Day-Old Grease Stains
by starpuncher
Summary: After several years of working at a failing branch of a multinational fast food franchise, Black Star still doesn't know where he's going with his life, or if he's going anywhere at all. When a courtesy call from a government employee informs him that his estranged father has been sentenced to death, he's forced to come to terms with the family he has, and to move forward.
1. Core Menu

The news comes in the form of an obligatory phone call from a government employee with a voice like worn-down leather shoes. Black Star hangs up two minutes in as the person on the other end of the line attempts to inform him of some minor procedural details. He briefly considers crushing the phone in his hand, but the small chunk of his mind that retains a capacity for rational thinking stops him before he gets any further than clenching his fist.

The time is 4:38 p.m. on a summer evening, and the combination of Nevada sun and asphalt is starting to get to the poor bastards wasting a work break by smoking and chatting in a solar-fried McMortie's parking lot. Soul does the smoking and Black Star does the chatting, for the most part.

"Your lungs are probably on fire right now, y'know," Black Star says, shoving his phone back into the pocket of his polyester uniform shorts.

Soul rolls his eyes so hard that the end of his cigarette shifts in his mouth. "Don't get all preachy on me. What's up?"

"Huh?"

"With the phone call, dumbass."

Black Star shrugs dismissively. "Nothing important. They shouldn't have even wasted my time calling about it." There's a pause, which in any other conversation would have been filled by one party weighing the risks of entrusting the other with the truth, and in which Black Star instead contemplates which lie he ought to tell in this particular scenario. It is not his nature to lie — more often than not he's honest to the point of insensitivity — but there are subjects which require a certain level of discretion.

Lips sealed as firmly as two boards in a carpentry glue commercial, Black Star picks his sweat-stained visor off the blistering blacktop, shoving it back over his spikes of gelled hair with a jaunty determination.

"I'm heading back in."

Soul looks at him as though he hadn't sprouted a second head just yet, but it would come as no surprise if he did so in the near future. "We've still got five minutes left on our break. Since when are you so eager to get back to work?"

Black Star moves his shoulders in a gesture that's less apathy and more a halfhearted attempt at nonchalance. "Since now. Keep up, won'tcha?"

It's 4:39 p.m. on a summer evening when Black Star first realizes the benefits of emotional repression.

Inside is quiet, a word not often associated with a dingy fast-food joint, but quiet is a relative term and the employees of this failing restaurant are not used to noise. The hiss of grease and the monotone cheer of the girl at the drive-through are background static by now; he's been here more than long enough to learn to tune things out. There are no customers badgering the cashiers and no muttered arguments between co-workers, ergo, you could hear a fucking pin drop in the place if one did happen to fall.

"Your break doesn't end for another five minutes." The manager, a tall man who by all accounts appeared more at home in a Tim Burton film than in the physical plane, makes his presence known by way of an unsolicited comment with an aggravatingly knowing tone.

Stein, the person that Black Star calls 'boss', is the sort of person who reads others like an open book and leaves them with the uncanny feeling that it would be a simple matter for him to tear out a page or two. The effect is universal and unintentional.

Black Star remains staunchly overconfident in the face of perceived scrutiny. "Shouldn't you be praising my newfound work ethic, boss?"

Turning over a new leaf and resolving to contribute more to one's chosen profession is noble in theory, but they're a few miles and a small township outside the realm of believability where Black Star is concerned. A man who routinely refuses to be subject to routine and simply doesn't show up to work at least once a week does not become enlightened to the benefits of labor at the drop of a company-mandated polyester visor. Stein knows this, and Black Star knows that he does.

Men with hideously disfiguring facial scars were not meant to grin so broadly or so often, and Stein had not so much missed that memo as he had received it, read it, and marked it 'return to sender.'

"I'll consider it. So who do I have to thank for this sudden change in character?"

The phone in Black Star's pocket spontaneously increases several ounces in weight. He ignores it. It occurs to him that he may end up doing a lot of that before the day is out.

"None of your business, old man."

Stein laughs. "Give them my regards. And try to hang on to that work ethic for a day or two if you can — I hired another cashier and I need you to train him."

"Since when are we hiring?"

"Special circumstances."

That kind of comment, which typically merits a moment's hesitation and no small degree of suspicion, barely gives Black Star pause.

"Special like classified information or special like you're gonna be vague about it until I get curious and beg to know what the deal is?"

Stein whistles. "You've definitely been working here too long. But if you really want to know, you'll figure it out soon enough tomorrow. I don't need to explain."

For once, Stein is right about that.

It's commonly accepted that there are certain people who just exude an aura of old money, as though their tax breaks are somehow palpable to those in the immediate vicinity. There are certain things that can be done to enhance this effect, of course, such as driving a car costing more than a decent college education and holding yourself like you're expecting a photo-op.

The scrawny piece of shit that introduced himself as 'the new guy' did neither of these things, but when someone wears a Rolex and more silver rings than are possibly necessary, Black Star feels safe in making certain assumptions about their lifestyle.

"You look out of place in that uniform," he informs the subject of his potentially premature judgement.

The new recruit shrugs, stiff and uncomfortable. "It's not what I'm used to, I can say that much."

"Why's someone like you working here?" Bluntness, in moderation, can be a great virtue. In Black Star, it found its strength in ruining conversations.

"Sorry?"

"Why's a rich kid working at a fast food joint?"

The soon-to-be-cashier current-pain-in-the-ass gives Black Star a withering look clearly practiced from years of prep school drama. "Nepotism, if you must know."

"Use real words."

"My father got me the job. This isn't any of your business, though. Aren't you supposed to be training me to do my new job?"

It's in this moment, with a black visor twirling around his finger and a stranger with more net worth in his expertly-manicured fingernail than Black Star has in his entire body staring him down, that Black Star realizes the power of first impressions.

But burying budding contempt in order to perform a subsect of the service you're being paid for is easy.

"It's going to take you like ten minutes at most to learn how to use a cash register — you could probably figure it out yourself, right? You being smart enough to tell me how to do my job and all."

The man's lip curls. "Pardon me if I'm speaking out of turn, but how does someone like you still have a job to begin with?"

In a moment of temporary clairvoyance, two courses of action stretch out before Black Star: the first of which entails a broken nose for the offending party, and a termination of employment for the breaker of said nose. It's tempting, but a momentary of violent satisfaction isn't worth letting his employer down, not over some new recruit with a big mouth. His fists remain resolutely unclenched.

"I like it here." There's no tension in his voice to hide. "And the old man in charge hasn't fired me yet."

The newbie keeps his Ivy League-educated mouth blissfully shut for the rest of the training session, save for the odd question about the mysterious inner workings of a rundown fast food joint.

"It's not exactly a five-star diner," Black Star says, gesturing to the fryers in back. "We don't get much business most of the time anyway. Whoever's manning the drive-through usually ends up sitting around and filing their nails." He waves to the nail-filer in question, who rolls her eyes quite pointedly in response.

"At least I get paid for it, and my nails look fantastic. Can't say the same for you, Star."

"Love ya, Liz."

"Whatever."

Insincere passive-aggression and cheeky declarations of affection were not always the norm for relationships born of proximity, but in a mutual desire for companionship, they'd eked out something resembling an honest friendship. Were Black Star to perish in some freakish accident in the near future, he'd hope that Liz would attend his funeral.

"Anyway." Black Star returns his attention to the man in front of him. "You know how to work the register, so you'll be fine, probably."

"No words of advice for me on dealing with customers?" the man asks dryly.

"Nah, that's something you've gotta work out on your own. It comes with experience."

"And how much experience do you have?"

"More than you, Mister Rolex. Next question."

"How much is 'more than me'?"

The honest answer would be that it was difficult to say, given the number of missed days and unannounced leaves of absence on his record. The unnecessarily detailed answer would be that Stein had given him the job as a personal favor, to keep the money needed for living costs in his pockets, and to hopefully keep Black Star in a position where he could be kept out of trouble, as anyone familiar with him would say.

The answer he gives is, "Around six years now. So does that wrap things up here or nah? Stein said I could head home once I was done with you, and I've got places to be."

He can almost hear the unasked _'where the hell would you have to go?_ ' spoken in the cloying tone of long-buried anxieties. But he's had an answer to that for a long time now, and in the theatre of his mind, he spits it in the face of his anxiety amalgam, blowing it to pieces. His anxieties are weak things that couldn't fight their way out of a wet paper bag, he's decided.

The man he's dubbed 'Mister Rolex' takes a long look about the place before nodding curtly. "Yes. I think that's it. I'll see you soon, I guess."

"Duh. Welcome to the crew, and see you later." Black Star throws a peace sign to the new recruit, fistbumps his favorite burger-flipper, and ollies out.

It's not until he reaches the bus stop that he realizes that he's still not feeling entirely himself. The cause of his sudden mental fog remains a mystery, one he could likely solve with a bit of time and effort, but Black Star is not one for self-reflection, and there are better ways of solving this kind of problem than sitting on his ass and thinking about his feelings.

Or maybe it's just something that he has to live with, he thinks. Either way, standing still won't do shit for anyone.

The bus arrives in a squeal of worn-out brakes and a cloud of dislodged dirt. The seats have been cleaned since yesterday, Black Star notes. He can tell because it's the same bus as ever, and the stains left from his bloody nose are gone. Their absence is slightly unsettling, and he has to ask himself why he's letting himself be so thrown by the existence of extra-strength stain removers.

It's the lack of a mark, he thinks. Of course fabric doesn't scar, there's nothing in the plastic seating to clot and there was never a wound to begin with, but with the bloodstains gone there's nothing left to show for the fight. Memories are intangible and fleeting, and with upheaval creeping up on him like vines growing at his feet, he doesn't want them to be all he has to know where he stands.

The ancient brakes screech, and Black Star exits the bus smelling faintly of mass-market fabric cleaner and public transport.

The way home is a six-block journey across residential intersections with little traffic, taking about eight minutes in total when properly traversed. Black Star runs the distance full tilt, dashing over crosswalks and up the concrete stairwell of his apartment building like he can feel the breath of some awful beast on his heels. He does it more for the showing off than anything, and out of an inability to do things by halves.

His roommate is nowhere to be found when he finally works out the mechanics of his room key and pries open the door, but there's a note on the table alerting him to the presence of leftovers in the fridge and apologizing for a regrettable absence.

Reheated mac and cheese eaten off of a dollar-store party plate is Black Star's idea of a feast fit for a king.

Tsubaki arrives home many hours later, after the feast has long since been consumed. She brings with her more apologies for the lateness, a bag of groceries, and maternal inquiries as to how Black Star's day went.

"It was okay," he tells her. "We got a new guy at work. How's your thing going?"

She groans faintly, and he winces out of sympathy.

Out of all his friends, which was at the moment a pitiably small pool, Tsubaki had known Black Star the longest, save for Maka, and had in that time shown him more than enough kindness and home-cooked meals to earn his unending loyalty. Giving him a place to stay, however, far outweighed her other favors.

Were Black Star to perish in some freakish accident in the near future, Tsubaki would certainly attend his funeral, and she would weep the longest and loudest.

There's a brief period of silence, punctuated by the soft static of a television with no cable box. Black Star can feel Tsubaki's eyes on him as they sit in silence.

"What happened," she says. Her tone straddles the line between flat and sympathetic.

Black Star inhales, exhales, and folds his arms behind his head, the chosen position for one who wants to remain casual while getting something heavy and ugly off his chest.

"It's my dad."

Tsubaki's demeanor softens. Her arm moves forward slightly, then stops as if she's reconsidered reassurance midway. She knows him well enough to keep her assurances non-physical.

"So it's decided?"

He nods. "Yep. Pops went and got himself the death penalty."

The static coming from the TV screen might form words if they listened hard enough.

"You don't sound like you care."

"That's just it." He pauses, then shrugs mildly. "I don't. It's not like I've seen the guy since I was way smaller than I am now."

"Couldn't you have visited him?"

Black Star barks something dimly resembling a laugh. "Come on, Tsubaki, a star like me's got better things to do than drag my heavenly body all the way out to a federal prison. What would I even do out there? Say hello to some mean old man in chains? Nah, Pops never did anything to earn a visit from the great me."

"What if they allow you a last visitation before the… ah…" The phrase 'execution' dies on the tip of her tongue.

"Dunno," Black Star says. "He was never much of a parent, but he's still the only family I've got. Wouldn't want him leaving this world without getting it hammered into his skull that his son's gonna be better than he ever was." It's difficult to tell how much of his smirk is forced. Maybe a fraction of the upward curve of his lips, or a few of his half-shown teeth, no more than that. He's not in the business of lying, with words or expression.

Tsubaki nods and hums softly. There's something she wants to say, locked behind closed lips, but it remains unsaid, and the static rises up again to fill the silence between them.

Night comes and they say goodnight, retreating to their own separate spaces like animals scurrying back into their burrows, wary of the rising moon and the call of wolves on the wind. Tsubaki leaves her bedroom door half-open to let the cool air waft in, and from the couch Black Star studies every crack and chip in the yellow paint of their apartment's walls. The water stain above his head looks like a cartoon skull if he squints hard enough. He wonders if it's meant to be an omen of death or a McMortie's logo.

Black Star isn't very well versed in symbolism and fortune-telling, but he thinks he'd prefer the latter.

Come morning and an early shift, he reconsiders.

"You look kinda dead," Kilik says as Black Star walks in with a grimace befitting a kidney stone.

"I think I might be," Black Star groans, propping himself up on the counter with one arm as though his imminent separation from his mortal coil might finally be sapping him of his last remaining strength. Kilik snorts as Black Star lets out the most dramatically pained groan he can summon.

"Yeah, waking up early has that effect on most people. If you're gonna keel over, make sure to do it away from the fryers."

Black Star shuffles slightly to the left. "Think I'm safe here?"

"Probably. Hey, me and Soul were thinking about going to a bar or something together after work. You wanna join us?"

"Since when do you and Soul hang out?"

"We don't usually. He's been working here for a while now though, I figure I should make him feel a little more welcome." Kilik idly picks a drop of dried something-or-other off the metal counter, flicking it away once the scab's come off. "He's going through some shit, you know."

"Is he?"

The door opens, and their conversation ends. They aren't being paid to stand around and shoot the shit, and for all pretense of laziness, they do know when to switch gears and put forth a certain degree of effort into being decent employees. It's draining sometimes, and they've spent plenty of time out in the parking lot after hours grousing about the emotional toll of faking pleasantry, but Kilik's smile would earn him any customer service award in the book if their workplace gave them out. Black Star's was more reminiscent of monkeys baring their fangs as a show of aggression.

"You're really bad at forcing a smile, shorty," Liz says as she comes in a while later.

Black Star slumps, removing his visor to run a hand through his mess of blue hair. The true cost of early hours is not the inevitable crushing exhaustion or the awful stench of a bus crammed with over-caffeinated laborers, but the unsightly effect of a morning too rushed for hair gel on a man accustomed to wearing his hair in skyward spikes.

"Maybe you're just a bad judge of good smiles," he tells her.

Liz snorts. "Whatever you say." Her smiles fades, and she leans in slightly, giving the conversation an illusion of privacy. "Tsubaki told me that you're not feeling so hot. Is everything okay? You know I can cover for you if you ever need a day off."

It's an empty gesture, mostly. She knows that he's got too much pride, and Black Star knows she's too busy to follow through on the offer. Still, it's the thought that counts, and she's only trying to extend a hand in support during a rough situation.

He puffs out his chest, banishing the forced smile and bringing on another form of acting in a bold tone and false offense. "Are you saying I can't handle my job myself, huh? You should know me better than that to think some measly hurdles are gonna make my star shine any less brightly! Whatever life throws at me, I'll throw it right back!"

Somewhere between sentences brimming with confidence, the false bravado becomes genuine. He's not in the business of lying, with words or expression, therefore whatever comes out of his mouth must be the truth.

By the end of his brief tirade, there's a faint grin on Liz's face as well. She raises her shoulders momentarily, expressing not her usual doubt or fear but a dismissal of previously stated concerns.

"Like I just said: whatever you say."

There's a common way of thinking among those who do their time in food service and similar stations which states that the friendships formed as a byproduct of sharing a place of employment are built on towers of sand, flimsy and fake compared to bonds outside from first blush. It's difficult to quantify an emotional bond, to be sure, and maybe it is true that for some, coworkers will never be more than acquaintances of convenience, but Black Star liked to think that the McMortie's just off of Highway 42 is an exception to that rule.

"You know," he says, dropping his arms to his sides as he relaxes, "Me, Soul and Kilik are going out to eat together after work tonight. You wanna come along?"

Liz shakes her head with a sigh. "Wish I could. I promised Patty I'd help her move her stuff into the new dorm, and — well, you know she's too stubborn to postpone the ordeal."

"Oh, she got in?"

"Yeah. It's a few years behind schedule and all, but better late than never, right?"

The back door swings shut, and Liz seems to jump ever so slightly at the sight of Stein slipping back into the restaurant's sole office space.

"—Anyway, we'll talk later." She whisks herself off to her assigned station with a small wave and without another word.

By the time Black Star and Soul finally pile into the back of Kilik's Honda Civic, Liz is long gone, having clocked out some hours ago to go help her sister. The sun is just beginning to go down, and generic pop music on low volume drifts out from the rolled-down windows like a dime-store swan song for the daytime.

"And why can't I ride shotgun, huh?" Black Star asks, reaching up front to jam the 'increase volume' button a few times.

Kilik swats his hand away. "Because I don't want you guys squabbling over the seat. Put your seatbelt on."

"How do you know it's not on already?"

"You shoved half your nasty sweaty body up next to me just to make sure that Katy Perry was basically screaming in my ear. Sit down."

Black Star does as he's told. A moment later, following Soul's pointed glance, he buckles his seatbelt for once in his life. The light changes, and Kilik accelerates down an empty street.

"So, are we just driving around, or are we planning on going somewhere tonight?" Soul asks after the belted lyrics of another tired top 40 smash hit fade into the evening air and Black Star finally closes his mouth.

Kilik shrugs, switching the station as an ad comes on. "Kinda. We usually drive around for a while so Star can get his yelling out of his system, and so I can 'unwind' by getting road rage in the emptiest parts of the whole city. You never hung out with Star outside of work?"

"He has a few times," Black Star interjects, "but you can't blame him for not having experienced one of my famous live car performances yet. Sorta hard for me to drive anywhere without a license, you know?"

Soul blinks. "You don't have a license? How old are you, twenty-one?"

"Twenty-four, thanks, and what's wrong with that?"

"Nothing, I guess, but—"

"Don't worry, if I ever miss the bus, I can just run to work! I've got strong legs and a strong heart, I'll be just fine." Black Star flexes for emphasis, earning him a roll of the eyes from the bored hipster next to him.

Kilik squints at the rearview mirror. "Is he flexing back there?"

Soul nods. "Yep."

They pull into an Ocho Burger parking lot as the sun sinks beneath a cityscape of apartments with the lights left on and office buildings where someone works far too late. Kilik's phone rings before he can even get a foot out the door, and as he's picking up he gestures for the other two to go on in with an apologetic smile.

"It's the government, probably," Soul says when Black Star asks who Kilik's been talking to for so damn long.

Black Star raises his eyebrows. "You think he's leaking my workout routine to Obama?"

"Definitely."

Kilik slides into their booth with a soda and a doubledecker as Black Star's taking the last bites of his meal. "Sorry that took so long. Grandma forgot that Fire and Thunder are at a sleepover tonight and got worried because I never brought them home."

Soul lets out a snort. "Hope Granny didn't have a heart attack over that one. You wanna earn my eternal affection and share some of that burger?"

"Man, you already ate. You'll live. Now if you'll excuse me—"

Black Star cuts Kilik off just as he's about to bite down into a well-deserved and much-craved meal. "You're still living with your grandma? I thought you moved out ages ago."

The burger in Kilik's hands remains sadly uneaten, a fact which Kilik appears to be contemplating as he gives it a longing stare. After a moment's internal deliberation he gives a small sigh and lowers it from his mouth's immediate vicinity.

"I did move out, yeah, but my roommate flaked out on me and I couldn't afford rent on a McMortie's paycheck. So I moved back in." Kilik pauses for a moment to snatch his soda out of Soul's reach and take a long, smug sip. "But… it's starting to look like I might be moving back out again real soon."

The news is nothing jaw-dropping on its own, but Black Star does him the courtesy of acting like it is, extended 'WHAAAAAT' and all.

Kilik grins. "Chill, that's not even the exciting part. Remember how I majored in engineering way back when?"

"Two years ago."

"An eternity, in modern terms. The point is, it's looking like I'm finally gonna be able to get some use out of it. I put in my two weeks with McMortie's today, and since the pay's better when you're not flipping burgers, I'll finally be able to afford my own place!" He's smiling, which is the worst part. "Pretty great, huh?"

Soul grins and holds his hand out to Kilik for a fistbump, offering a 'Congrats, man' as their fists touch, and Black Star has a moment to wonder how Soul can be so goddamn casual before the magnitude of Kilik's announcement sinks in.

It feels like a bad transition from Windows movie maker, everything stretching and distorting around him in a botched version of a zoom effect. The rug hasn't been pulled out from under him; he's been standing on his own two feet for as long as he can remember and he's proud of that, but someone's come in and rearranged all the fixtures, and he doesn't know how to adapt to such a rapid change in scenery.

The question of _'why are you fucking doing this'_ burns a hole through his tongue and falls through before he can let it touch air, and the words that spill out in its place are weak and watered-down.

"Oh. Yeah, dude, that's great!" Until this point, Black Star had almost forgotten that he avoids lying as a rule not only for reasons of morality, but because he's incredibly fucking bad at it. He doesn't believe in any god but himself, so he thanks coincidence and a lucky star for the lack of observance demonstrated by two of his closest friends. The smile on his face is a rubber mask, warped and uncomfortable, but willpower alone is just enough to keep it from sliding off.

Black Star wants to be excited for his friend, but a hole is already forming in the restaurant off of Highway 42 and there is a premature weight making a home on his chest, dull and heavy like a sinking stone.

This is the point where those well versed in social niceties and bottling things up would find an excuse to exit the conversation, flee to a bathroom or to a cigarette break and lick their half-formed wounds. He doesn't; he stays and he lets Kilik see right through him, because deep down, he'd rather let his distress over his friend leaving ruin the night than spend the next few hours playing a part.

Kilik's smile is wiped away by burger grease and the cold backdraft of intense loyalty.

"You can just say you're not happy about it, you know."

The tension now forming prickles with all the promise of an oncoming storm, and Soul looks for all the world like a confused pedestrian just now realizing that he's left his umbrella at home.

Black Star's expression moves from feigned passiveness to genuine anger with impressive speed.

"Am I supposed to be? You wanna just leave with no warning and—"

"I told you, I put in my two weeks."

"You didn't tell me!"

"I'm telling you now."

"That's not good enough!"

There's a silence, one lasting long enough for Black Star to recognize the expression Kilik's wearing as not anger, but hurt. He drops his hostile glare and picks at a loose seam in his jeans, pretending to not notice or care what he's done.

Inhale. Exhale. Keep moving forward.

"I just think," Black Star says in a tone not so much measured as estimated, "you could have told me sooner."

Kilik lets out a sigh, and the look he gives Black Star when their eyes meet again is enough to both plant and grow a seed of guilt. "I could have, yeah. But you can't blame me for putting it off when I knew you wouldn't be happy to hear it."

This is the downside of knowing someone so well, after all. Black Star is no stranger to doing stupid things to protect someone else, regardless of how they might feel about it, and he's intimately familiar with the fallout of a found coverup as well. He's never been on this side of these things before, and he's quickly deciding that he'd rather be misguided than a fool.

Kilik swallows, and whatever comes out his mouth next is obscured by a loud and pointed cough from their party's nigh-forgotten third member.

"Maka's visiting this weekend," Soul says.

Black Star blinks. Kilik rubs the back of his neck. "Really?"

Soul nods, and reaches for Kilik's soda. Kilik makes no move to stop him from taking a long, satisfying sip.

"Yeah, she texted me this morning to ask if she could camp with me instead of spending money on a hotel room. Dunno how long she's staying, but I doubt she's gonna want to spend more than a weekend in my place."

The statement is met with an uncomfortable silence.

In their time running in the same circles, Kilik and Black Star have become accustomed to certain people stepping in to minimize conflict, and to certain friends knowing just what to say to diffuse an argument or distract from tension. Soul is not and has never been one of those designated as damage control.

Kilik opens his mouth, and then reconsiders.

Black Star grins, and in doing so discovers that he actually means it. "Dude, that's great! Why didn't she tell me? Me and Tsubaki have plenty of space in our place, she could have totally bunked with us!"

"Firstly, you sleep on a couch because your place only has one bedroom, and secondly — well." This time it's Soul's turn to rub the back of his neck as a physical indication of mild discomfort. "Actually, I wasn't supposed to tell you guys. She was gonna surprise you by showing up at McMortie's while you were on duty, so you've gotta act shocked and excited when that does happen. Promise?"

A pinky promise is about as antiquated and childish a solidifier of agreements as is possible, but there's an odd security that comes from touch, and a reassuring trust that follows it. As they leave the restaurant with stomachs full of grease and hearts burdened by the undue stress of arguments between friends, Black Star bemoans having been shot down on his suggestion to 'spit on our hands and shake on it, like in the movies.'

"Give it up, dude, it's gross and not nearly as cool as the movies make it look," Kilik says, buckling his seatbelt and shoving his keys in the ignition.

Soul raises a pale eyebrow. "How would you know?"

Kilik jabs a thumb towards Black Star, and pulls out of the parking lot without another word.

The drive home is quieter without Black Star's backseat serenades and the light-hearted critique of his vocal range. It's summer still, but the air feels colder rolling in through their open windows, crossing paths with the final reprise of a summer pop hit's earworm chorus. The radio turns to static as the music crescendos, and Kilik switches to another station.

Black Star has Kilik drop him off two miles away from his apartment without reason or excuse, as if they both don't know their geography and the respective location of his place of residence. The walk home is long, but three-quarters of a mile with an wounded driver would have somehow managed to be longer. There's no comparable past experience that lets Black Star know this — it's an instinctive guess carrying the dead certainty of a man who's nearly been shot, telling the police how close the bullet came to his eyes.

The apartment is empty when he forces his way through the unlocked door, and his father's face is on the late-night news.

They're still using footage from fifteen years back; he can tell by the grain in the images and the face in the photos and the way that his father looks exactly the same on the flickering television screen as he does in Black Star's blurred memories. The anchor's eyes glaze over as she straightens the papers before her, reading out a history of violence with all the emotion of a cardboard cutout.

Black Star does not consider his father a part of his life or his identity; he has not viewed the man who brought him into this world and into this country as more than a criminal with too much blood on his hands since he was smaller and more easily fooled, but the surname beneath the mugshot is still his, and the man on the screen is still his father.

The anchor tells the camera that this mass murderer is succeeded by a son, and Black Star turns the TV off.

A small voice rises up from the dark recesses of his mind, slipping through holes he'd thought he'd plugged up long ago and whispers in his ear with a voice like black oil — _why does it bother you?_ Black Star wills his consciousness into the form of a middle finger, and lets the pull-up bar on the kitchen doorframe become his escape from a conversation with himself that he's not prepared to have.

The problem is not him caring. The problem is that no matter what he does, or who he choses to be, his family is still his own, and even if by some miracle of lies and repression he finally manages to stop giving a shit, there will always be people who do.

Black Star's muscles ache, but the sweat on his brow is still only droplets. He keeps going.

"You look tired," Tsubaki tells him when she returns to fill the empty spaces between the blank TV screen and the traffic lights. She lets the question of why he's still up go unspoken, and retrieves two portions of week-old leftovers from the depths of an empty fridge.

Black Star accepts the cold meal and frowns. "I'm never tired. You know me, Tsubaki. You could run this whole country off my raw energy for months if some brainiac scientist would just figure out how to harness my star power. I could stay awake for days if I wanted!"

And maybe that is true, but he finds himself wanting to close his eyes soon enough. He lets his body fall horizontal when Tsubaki steps outside for a late-night call, telling her that it's fine, he doesn't mind the interruption, knowing that their conversation will have to wait until the morning. Sleep comes as a flood, trickling down his brow with a deceiving gentleness before sweeping him away and swallowing him whole. The din of a living city and the swan song of a broken fan are Black Star's last lullabies before his eyes slide shut.


	2. Margin Markup

In the morning, Black Star remembers blood on his fist and his father's broken nose. For a moment, he wonders how he managed to get his fist through the cell bars.

"Do you think it's possible to have dreams about the future?" he asks Tsubaki over matching bowls of stale cereal.

She considers the question, decides on a noncommittal shrug as her response.

"It'd be nice if that was possible, I think. Maybe some people do have dreams like that."

Black Star grins. "Well, I hope I just developed some kind of future sight or whatever, because my dream was amazing."

"Oh? What was it about?"

"Punching my old man in his ugly nose."

Tsubaki nods gravely and takes another bite of her off-brand corn flakes. "That one might just be prophetic, actually."

The faces on the TV this morning are mercifully unfamiliar. Neither of them have anywhere in particular to be, and so they content themselves with flipping through channels as if they're actually looking for something, air conditioner humming away the last days of summer in the background.

There's a term for this, Black Star's pretty sure, but it's lurking somewhere out of his reach and hell if he's got the energy to go looking. It's a dangerous calm, like the moment before a wave crashes down on the waiting shore, when all you can see before you is a serene blue and the dreamlike shimmer of sunlight through a piece of sea.

Maybe if he turned around the skyscrapers would be on fire.

A phone rings, and they both go for their pockets, Black Star slumping back into position and picking up his weights once it's evident that the generic default setting ringtone isn't chiming for him.

In total, the call takes just shy of twenty minutes, or a few hundred sit-ups, depending on how Black Star wants to measure the passage of time. Once Tsubaki finally says goodbye and returns her phone to her pocket, she grabs her sneakers from the floor with an urgency that Black Star's come to recognize as excitement, and tells him that they've got somewhere to be, so they'd better get moving.

Although shoes in the summer are an unnecessary item as far as Black Star is concerned, he does his friend a solid by shoving on a pair himself before following her out the door.

The heat hits him in a way consistent with stepping directly into a wall of molasses. Winter is coming, but summer is going out with a bang.

He elbows Tsubaki to draw her attention back to him as she mulls over a bus route.

"So what's your girlfriend want?"

Tsubaki tucks a piece of hair behind her ear in a habitual indicator of an oncoming blush. "We haven't been together very long, I don't think I'd—"

"Yeah, yeah, so what's Liz want with us anyway?"

The bus arrives in a screech of tires and a cloud of urban stink, and Black Star nods in agreement to a statement that was cut off halfway.

Rather than attempt to confine Black Star to a space as small as her living quarters, Liz had wisely chosen to host their meeting at one of many forgettable coffee stores on the city's east side. The establishment in question is small, dingy, and near completely vacated save for their small table and a man in the corner who looks much too familiar for a stranger.

"It's just deja vu, probably," Liz reassures him when Black Star points out that the guy sitting in the corner really fucking looks like their district manager. "Besides, Justin's gotta be in church praising it up or whatever that guy actually does anyway. He goes there like, daily."

"You think he's like a cultist or something?"

"I wouldn't be surprised. Has Soul texted you recently?

Black Star checks his phone. This process would normally take seconds, but realizing that the device in question is dead requires a bit more time. He mumbles something profane under his breath, and shoves it back in his pocket. "Wouldn't know; my phone went and died on me. So what are we all here for anyway?"

Living in the technological age works against Liz for once, as she's robbed of the opportunity to spread out a battle plan in true dramatic fashion by the fact that she's already got everything written out on her phone. She settles for looking mildly professional as she scrolls through her calendar pages.

"Party planning. Now, I'm not really that big on this stuff, but we can't just let Kilik go waltz off to, uh, engineering things or whatever, without some kind of sendoff. You're basically his best friend, so you're gonna give me advice on what sort of stuff we could do for him."

"What's Tsubaki here for?"

"She's better at compromising with you on your harebrained ideas than I am. Also, girlfriend."

Tsubaki is primed to shush Black Star before he even comes around to being offended by Liz's opinion of his brilliant schemes, concern for potential noise temporarily overriding observation. She doesn't notice how Black Star's eyes dart down for an instant, how he's shifted ever so slightly from openness to crossed arms.

Settling back for a moment as though in thought, Black Star ponders a question unrelated to current events. He nods, mostly for his own benefit.

"Nah."

"What?"

"I don't think I'm gonna be much help to you right now, so nah. I'm not going to give you any advice on this whole shebang. You guys can handle ordering pizzas and stuff without me anyway, right?" He pushes out his chair and stands, shoving his hand in his pockets. "We'll talk later, probably, but I've got places to be. A big man like me's always on the move, you know?"

Hero, exit stage left. In the theatre of his mind no additional acting cues are given, and so he departs with little more than a brief wave.

Dodging responsibility is incredibly liberating under the right circumstances, and while the stars have not aligned in that particular configuration today, Black Star can pretend to not feel guilty and achieve a similar effect. It's not the same, but it's enough to get him away from a party planning session and onto a bus, that shining chariot of inner city transport.

The man sitting next to him smells of gasoline and engine grease. Black Star gets off at the end of the line, and finds himself not on recognizable stomping grounds, but on a familiar path. He pauses for a moment, staring over the bridge and the highway below as he weighs his options with the care of a bodybuilder planning out his next routine.

Is it worse to go visit your workplace during your free time, or to get yourself completely fucking lost?

The latter has a certain appeal, but he's been down that road before, and adventures in a city with more rats than street cleaners involve more grime and fistfights than he's willing to get into today. There is a time and place for exploring the parts of the city that you've never seen, and this isn't it. It would be supremely rude to call Tsubaki away from a date to help him find his way back home as he did during his last voyage into uncharted waters.

"Maybe next time," he remarks to no one in particular. He stretches, goes through the motions of checking his unresponsive phone for unread messages, and hits the road.

A distance of four miles is nothing on the morning commute, and it's nothing now, even without the public transportation system to ferry him across the highways and through the chaos of city streets. By the time the grey plastic roof and black asphalt of a familiar parking lot come into view, Black Star hasn't even broken a sweat. He thanks not the past experience of a disappointing cross country bid, but his own infallible tenacity for this font of stamina and endurance, mentally patting himself on the back for a job well done.

No one will congratulate him for his many feats of athleticism if he doesn't do it himself, Black Star has learned. The last of the ice cream in the freezer back home can serve as his prize when he returns from this temporary trip down a road paved with bad decisions.

The new guy is working the register when Black Star comes in, which is by all accounts not a favorable sign. The Rolex is gone from his wrist. Black Star wonders if it got stolen, or if the owner finally got as smart as his Ivy League degree and removed it himself.

He is not greeted by an expression of disdain when he walks up to the counter, and this surprises him.

"Happy to see me?" he asks. The man behind the counter gives him a deadpan stare.

"We aren't precisely friends, but yes, I suppose it's nice to have some company as I man my post at this failing enterprise."

"You talk like you swallowed a dictionary. Have you seen Stein?"

"He's around."

"Don't be vague about it, asshole."

"You don't need to be rude, Black Star."

"Since when are we on a first name basis?"

"Since I, with my fully functioning eyeballs, read your nametag on my first day here." The dark-haired man pauses, recalling a detail so minor a trained detective wouldn't have given it more than a moment's notice. "Why did you scratch a star in between your first and last name, by the way? You're not allowed to deface your uniform, you should know that."

Black Star doesn't realize what he's talking about for a moment. The engraving was made so long ago that he's forgotten it's even there, etched forever into the metal marker by a rusty nail and a determined hand. If he had the nametag with him now, he could see where his fingers shook on the fifth point of the miniature star.

"I wasn't defacing it, I was fixing it. Whoever's in charge of names around here got mine wrong, so I had to fix it myself. The star's important, you know!"

The man at the counter scoffs. "Names are made up of letters, not symbols. There's no way that's your actual name."

"You bet it is! My dad's got a star in his name too." He catches himself just before he trips over his words. The realization that his father will soon be spoken of in the past tense does little for his enunciation. "You're just jealous that you've got a boring, pedestrian name, while I've got the kind of name you see up in lights."

The man raises a thin, carefully shaped eyebrow. Black Star wonders how long its owner spends trimming it.

"Do you even _know_ my name?"

Black Star does not. Foolishly, he bluffs.

"Of course I do! It's on your nametag too, isn't it?"

Look before you leap is a fine adage, but something along the lines of 'think before you open your fucking mouth' would likely be more appropriate to Black Star's long and oftentimes unfortunate series of social faux pas.

The thin, well-groomed, palpably wealthy young man in front of him is not wearing a nametag of any kind. This fact is immediately, painfully obvious to the only party to have been paying attention.

Luckily or unfortunately, the mistake is egregious enough to earn him pity rather than scorn, though the long-suffering sigh let out by his reluctant partner in conversation might have very well drained away a few years of his life energy.

"No, because, as you can see, I don't have one. There was… a small mixup with mine that has yet to be corrected." His tone is measured and laid out in a precise pattern, tone and pauses spelling out 'don't ask' as clearly as black letters on a white backdrop. "My name is Kid, to clear that up for you."

The back door clicks. On its own, the noise is indistinguishable from the low hum of an active kitchen. When followed by the scrape of a rolling chair pulled over old flooring, it becomes recognizable as the return of their oft-absent employer.

Kid tucks a loose string of hair behind his ear and tilts his head towards the back. "Stein seems to be back, if you haven't yet forgotten your business with him." There's a small streak of white near his right ear, Black Star notes, dimly recalling that premature greying is supposedly caused by stress. He wonders what it was that made Kid's hair lose its color.

"Yeah, I figured." He pauses to stretch, a force of habit more than anything, and heads for the back office. Kid raises no objection to his departure.

There's a faint click of nails on plastic as Black Star walks past Kid, as if someone had briefly lifted their hand in a half-hearted goodbye.

The room located in the furthest corner of the restaurant was originally a storeroom, supposedly, a theory lent credence by the large set of built-in shelves lining the rightmost wall. Having since been repurposed into the sole office space in the building, the room's shelves ought to have been taken out long ago, but fate seemed to have intervened, likely in the form of a tall man with a large scar. Under the former storeroom's current occupant, the preserved shelves house preserved insides, a ceiling to floor collection of questionably legal morbidity which, like its owner, would be much more at home in a Tim Burton film than in the physical plane. Black Star knocks a mason jar containing an eyeball over on his way in.

"Fuck, ew!"

Stein makes a note on the paper before him, neglecting to look up from his desk at his unexpected visitor.

"Don't worry about it, the ones by the door are fake."

"Just the ones by the door?"

"You'll never know." The scratching of Stein's pencil fills the momentary silence. "I don't think I've ever seen you show up here on an off day before. That newfound work ethic of yours must really be something."

Black Star frowns and pulls a chair up to Stein's desk, warily avoiding the liquid left behind by the smashed jar. "Don't thank me for gracing this greasehole with my stellar presence; I got off at the wrong stop and I had some stuff to say to you anyway, so here I am. Don't think I'm here to beg you for overtime."

Stein laughs, a sound that straddles the boundary between humorless and amused with the skill of a one-legged tightrope walker. "I didn't think you were. Though I'll admit, I am surprised to see you. The last time you dropped in on me out of the blue, you were asking me to fix a broken leg for you."

"Broken arm."

"Whichever. That was some injury, you know. Shredded muscle, visibly torn ligament, bone poking out, blood everywhere, and you never even told me how you got it." He sighs, almost wistfully. "I don't suppose you're hiding some kind of injury that needs immediate medical attention. If you are, I hope you've brought your own bandages."

"Why's your first assumption that I need help?"

Another mark is made on a paper that Black Star can't fully see. A more paranoid person would have wondered if they'd been somehow tricked into a surprise evaluation or a plotted murder. But of course, it took very little imagination to fear a man with such intimate knowledge of a human's insides.

Stein's eyes remain on what Black Star assumes to be his work, and he speaks in a tone that would be uncaring coming from anyone else. "You have a long history of either causing trouble or getting into it. I would know; I've patched you up more times than the hospital has. It's a reasonable thing to assume."

They both recall the blood staining the kitchen floor and the ugly shape of a broken bone, the quiet warnings to keep your hands clean and the defiant retorts. Stein remembers the pattern of bruises that formed beneath the boy's eye and the way curses echoed through an empty restaurant, the quiet fear of hearing a midnight brawl turned ugly through empty streets. A fight isn't a pretty thing, no matter how you dress it up in masculinity and an aesthetic of action movie badassery. Stein might have told Black Star something along those lines back when he'd been stitching up a cut made by a teenager's pocket knife, but memory is not always an infallible thing. There are things that slip through the cracks without the knowledge or permission of their owner, and there are things that stick around as old stains, ugly and obvious as the day they spilled.

Black Star remembers the Superman bandage he'd pasted over his cheek like a dollar-store badge of honor.

There's a lot to be said for having someone in your corner with a medical degree and plenty of stitches.

"Fine, you've got me there. But that's not why I'm here! Look, totally healthy, no bloody knuckles or anything!" He sticks out his fist to prove his point, oddly proud of its lack of callus or injury. Stein pushes it away with the end of his pencil.

"Good work on that, kid."

"Hey! I'm an adult, I pay bills."

"Sure." Another movement of the pencil. The faint scratches have a rhythm to them, like clockwork set askew. Stein pushes his glasses up with the end of his eraser between beats. "So if you don't need something fixed up, why are you here? It's got to be something important. You'd never set foot in here on an off day if it wasn't. You're not quitting on me now, are you?"

In all twenty-four years of his life, there were only two instances where Black Star could have been said to have quit at anything. The first was in a fit of frustration at an arcade game when he was ten years old. The second was a longer story involving two fistfights, more in-school suspensions than could be counted, and an endless string of bad test scores.

The look Black Star gives Stein in response to his presumption is an odd cocktail of incredulity and understanding that _yes, okay, I can see why you'd think that_ , shaken and poured into a container of mild offense.

"What? No way! I've been here six years, I'm not just gonna quit on you so easy! You'll have to try harder than that to get rid of me."

"That's the thing though, isn't it?" The scratching of the pencil stops. "You've been here a long time now. Most people would at least be thinking about moving on to bigger and better things. I'm not complaining about having you around, just curious about why you're staying."

Black Star doesn't have an answer for that loaded question, and the empty space where words should be weighs so much more than a lack of speech ever should.

Stein adjusts his glasses, and resumes his rhythm. "You don't have to answer that, of course. What brought you here in the first place?"

"To McMortie's?"

"To my office."

"I knew that." Black Star shifts slightly in his seat. "I need Monday off. Kilik can't cover for me like usual, but I need it anyway."

What could have been a pensive pause on Stein's part is ruined by his continued focus on something that Black Star increasingly suspects to be not work-related. The organs on the wall float in clear liquid, the eyes in jars giving him a look much too prying for things with no bodies to call their own. Their curator seems not to care.

"You could have just called about this."

"Yeah, well, here I am. So can you give me Monday or not?"

The request doesn't seem odd until he lends it voice. For an instant, Black Star is struck by a small hope of rejection. The sensation is surreal in a way he hopes to only experience once in his potentially long lifetime.

Stein's glasses slip the tiniest distance down his nose when he inclines his head in a small nod, but the smile on his face is more noteworthy than the position of his bifocals. "Well, since you asked so nicely." The grin slips from his face like spilled oil off murky waters, replaced by a neutrality almost resembling concern. He pushes the much-marked paper to the side and deposits the pencil in a cup shaped like a Rubik's Cube, and now the barriers are gone.

Black Star dimly observes that Stein has spent the majority of their conversation consumed by a game of Sudoku.

The voice that Stein uses to address him is not delicate or sensitive, because Stein himself is neither. It's trying to fit in more information in implication than in spoken word, and for the most part, it succeeds. So much can be packed into a simple statement of, "If you need to take any longer, you can. You'll probably find that you'll need it."

Realizing that his employer knows about his father's sentence does not bring the lightning bolt of shock that Black Star would have expected of such an uncomfortable truth. It's a slow roll of thunder in the distance after the flash, a vague omen whose presence is more a comfort than a source of fear. He would have been more surprised if the thunder never came. A twenty-four hour news cycle leaves no room for privacy in twisted grief, even if the subjects of the late-night reports and breaking news bulletins cannot feel the eyes of the world on their backs.

But still, something cold trickles in through the storm windows and pools at his feet, and he can see a basic cable broadcast of an old mugshot in the ripples of its surface.

Black Star nods. The motion does nothing to clear his head. "Yeah. Thanks, I guess."

"I mean that. It'll be better for you in the long run to take your time with this." What exactly 'this' might be is left unspecified. Grief and loss are strong contenders for this game of fill in the blank.

"You think I don't know that?"

"I think it's worth a reminder."

A moment with the potential to grow from a modest pause to an awkward silence is interrupted by the distinctive chime of a smartphone just a few generations out of date. Stein wastes no time in retrieving his phone from his pocket, oblivious to all social norms dictating the rudeness of this gesture. The smile returns to his face for an easily missed instant.

"Who was that?" Black Star asks.

"My husband," Stein says. "He's locked himself out of our apartment." The phone in his hand buzzes another three times. "I think he might be crying."

Black Star blinks before leaping directly into slack-jawed disbelief. "You're married?"

"Yes."

"Like, you had a wedding and stuff."

"Correct."

It's occasions like this for which the word 'flabbergasted' was invented.

Black Star doesn't mean to gape, but the road to rude behavior is paved with good intentions. "When did this happen? And like, how? You really don't seem like the type to get married."

"Last December, I think. Seven people attended the wedding, us and the pastor included." Stein pauses, turning his cell phone over in his gaunt hands. "How it happened, I'm not quite sure. I used to think that I'd never have the time for marriage, but then, I also thought I was going to end up a surgeon. I've proven to be pretty bad at predicting my own fate."

For a moment, the surrealism of present circumstances manages to remain a mystery, leaving Black Star without an explanation for the uncanny sensation of something distinctly off crawling down his back like a wayward spider. Then it hits him — Stein is _volunteering_ information about himself.

"...Why are you telling me all this, old man?"

Stein shrugs. The phone buzzes again. His ringtone is the kind of music you hear once at a shitty indie festival and spend the rest of your life wondering who opened that night anyway. The tinny sound of recorded synthesizers carries through the humid air of the poorly-ventilated office like cheap dye through water, a split-second burst of color that wasn't designed to last.

The music fades out, and Stein rises from his desk with a painful crack of the neck. "It's been entertaining having you visit, but I've got to break into my own apartment. You're welcome to stick around and babysit the viscera while I'm away."

Black Star throws a disgusted glare at the globs of flesh that might have once been someone's intestines, and pushes himself out of his seat with the haste of an anti-social cousin leaving a family dinner. He jabs a finger at Stein, half-yelling, "Hey, you can't just walk away from a question like that!" as though volume has ever made his boss listen harder.

Stein smiles, and the scar on his face contorts grotesquely. "Are you going to stop me?" The door closes behind him, and Black Star is left alone with the ingredients of a knockoff Frankenstein.

"What's his deal anyway?" he mutters to no organ in particular. The eyes rotate slowly in their jars of preservative.

Kid is still by the cash register when Black Star exits the office, which is more of a surprise than it logically should have been. Acclimatizing to a new coworker is an uphill battle of Black Star reminding himself over and over that yes, that guy is actually supposed to be here, and yes, there is a persistent air of snobbery hanging around Kid like fog over San Francisco, but that's just something he'll have to get used to. At least it's only a chilly atmosphere instead of a cold shoulder.

"He left just as soon as he arrived," Kid says dryly as Black Star approaches him. "What was it that you said to make him leave so quickly?"

Black Star shakes his head. "Him booking it had nothing to do with me. And even if it did, why would I tell you?"

"Because I'm curious, and I asked politely."

Black Star can't tell if Kid's speaking out of entitlement or sincerity. He gives a dismissive wave and keeps walking to the door.

"You can ask the old man yourself if you really wanna know, but it's not anything interesting." As he comes to the nylon doormat with its black and white lettering, he looks back at Kid, and flashes a peace sign. "I'll see you later, yeah?"

'Later' is a word that paints the future with a broad brush, collecting minutes and months and years of moments under a single phrase. Somewhere in the folds of a daily planner, he'll meet Kid again, but the hour and date remain unknown. Uncertainty can be refreshing, in a way.

In a handful of days too small to matter and too large to live through, Kilik will be somewhere away from him and his father will be dead and he will still be as he is now, a problem child smelling of grease and sporting old bruises. He could make a calendar if he wanted, cross off the days until the other shoe drops with little black 'x's and pretend that it'll all be fine once the countdown ends.

When Black Star gets home he finds nothing awaiting his arrival, no hasty note or familiar face to strike his attention. Turning on the television gives him a man in khaki shorts peddling an espresso maker that Black Star couldn't afford if he saved up for the next seven years. The man's face is unfamiliar, as is the machine that could be his for just ten installments of more money than he has. He changes the channel. Every other story or advert on the available basic programming is similarly foreign.

It takes a few tries to plug in his phone's charger, the crackle of afternoon weather stations and faint clamor of rush hour traffic going in one ear and out the other as he struggles to straighten the bent prongs. After a moment of electric connection the screen lights up with a list of missed messages and Twitter alerts.

Two of them are from Kilik. He leaves his phone and its text history in the living room while he goes to shower off the sweat of a day spent in avoidance.

Running water on cracked tiles sounds like a whole lot of questions he doesn't want to ask himself, a cacophony of cruel whispers and every single fucking thing he's ever tried to push down and ignore. He hates running, he hates the idea that there's something out there that he might not be able to handle, but a man can only deal with so much bullshit from his subconscious mind before he has to shut off the flood and give himself a goddamn break.

Black Star goes for the pull-up bar the minute he exits the bathroom, trading the sweat washed down the shower drain for a faint sheen on his brow. Somewhere between the first and the fiftieth time his chin rises over the metal frame, he regains his sense of control. The next few hundred reps are for fun.

Tsubaki doesn't come home that night, and it feels strangely okay.

Space is good, sometimes, and although silence is hard to come by in a city where the lights and roadways never truly sleep, the illusion of it can be good too. Having a place to himself, however temporarily, still feels like a privilege, even if the gaps where another person should be are quick to fill with things that belong at the back of his mind, either under lock and key or chained up in the basement of his brain.

He remembers a sex dream he had in what should have been college, and the melodrama of intrusive thoughts grinds to a weird yet welcome halt.


	3. Table Turns

Morning breaks. Unsurprising, but it does happen. Black Star's alarm goes off at precisely 8:30 a.m., several hours before he has anything to do or anywhere to be. The lack of hot coffee and _good morning_ -s tells him that Tsubaki still hasn't come home, earning her a silent congratulations on making it past second base. Outside the open window, a truck drives past, smelling of distant roadways and gasoline. Black Star straps on a pair of sneakers old enough for their first day in kindergarten, and goes running.

In a city with fewer bike lanes than obscure indie record stores, jogging paths not mired in construction are hard to come by, leaving the more active members of the populace to seek out alternative routes for their morning grind. Black Star doesn't keep to a specific course when sweating off his free time in the molasses air of an unexpected heatwave, but he runs like lightning crackling through the cramped and littered streets, like he could outrace the seconds counted on his hand-me-down watch if he tried just a little bit harder.

It's showmanship, mostly. Give the audience what they want, impossible feats of strength and agility, even when the seats are empty and the spotlights are gone.

Black Star leaps the Olympic hurdle of an upended trash can and grins like he's won the gold.

Work is impossibly slow with the adrenaline rush of an extended run lingering in his system like customers after closing. Soul keeps him company as he scrapes the walls of an old fryer, serving chunks of hardened oil to a nearby garbage bin and making gagging sounds when his finger brushes the larger pieces.

Kilik is at his usual register. Cleaning the fryers is a good excuse for distance.

"We could probably take a break about now," Soul says, inspecting the fruits of Black Star's labor with an eye for passability rather than perfection. "It looks good to me."

"Firstly," Black Star says, "you didn't even do anything. Secondly, I've still gotta scrub this one out. Haven't you ever cleaned a fryer before?"

"No. How much longer is this gonna take?"

"Like an hour, probably."

Soul groans. "Just get Kim or Jackie to take care of it."

"I can handle this!"

"Relax, I never said you couldn't. I just think we've earned a break."

"Again, you did nothing," Black Star reminds him, pointing his spatula towards Soul accusingly. "And I'm still gonna finish this."

"Dude…" Soul rubs his temples, around where the sweat builds up under a polyester visor an hour or so into a shift. "Okay, whatever. If I actually help, will this go any faster?"

Black Star glances at the grimy piece of equipment and shakes his head. "Not really."

"Great."

They're greeted by the blinding rays of an afternoon sun when they finally push open the back door and escape to the familiar heat of warmed asphalt. Visors designed first for looks and not in the fucking slightest for functionality do little to protect from the sudden light. Black Star squints. Soul shields his eyes with the hand holding his box of cigarettes, and curses loudly when the nicotine sticks spill onto the curb. On the other side of the parking lot, someone waves. Their pigtails sway with the motion.

"What." It takes a moment for the light to go on once the switch has been flipped, and then Black Star is running full tilt across the parking lot, slamming into Maka and hugging her hard enough to hurt. She laughs through a painful wince and hugs him back all the same, only letting go when her first and best friend finally peels himself away.

Black Star's grin is brighter than the desert sun. "How are you here? I thought your flight didn't leave until tomorrow! Did you learn to teleport or something? If you did, you've gotta teach me." He talks with his hands as well as his words, forming vague, excited gestures to drive home how thrilled he is to see her.

Maka laughs. It sounds like summer camp seven years ago and high school track meets. "I took a different flight, duh. I wanted to get here early to surprise you, since _someone_ —" she glares at the man playing 52-card pickup with a box of cigarettes, "—went and blabbed about my secret visit. I've been waiting out here for like an hour!"

"For the record," Soul grumbles, approaching them with reboxed cigarettes firmly in hand, "I'm _great_ at keeping secrets. This doesn't count."

Both Maka and Black Star snort loudly. In any situation involving the three of them, Soul falls to the bottom of the pecking order, a fact of which all are acutely aware.

"It counts," Maka says, "but at least you told me that you didn't keep your mouth shut."

"Okay, forget about Soul for a sec," Black Star interrupts, earning him an annoyed frown from the man in question. "We've got like a million things to talk about, but this break we're on lasts, what, ten minutes?"

"It's ten minutes, yeah," Soul concurs.

"Thanks. So what's the plan? Are you gonna kidnap us from work so we can all hang out?" Black Star feels like he might be begging for Maka to do just that. He's only kind of disappointed when she shakes her head, crushing his split-second pipe dream under the heel of her clunky black boots.

"Not you, at least. Soul's coming with me. We'll meet up with you after your shift ends."

Soul puts a hand on Black Star's shoulder in mock sympathy. "Sorry, dude, but the boss only gave me the a-okay to leave early."

"You can't leave work early, what the hell."

"Sure can; Stein said so."

"Can he do that?"

Maka cuts in with a loud cough.

"Anyway," she says, "meet up with us at Ocho Burger in two hours. We'll have plenty of time to talk then. Later?" She sticks out a fist. Black Star meets it with an open palm, and they launch into their secret handshake with the practiced ease of two kids who once took way too much pride in their elaborate version of a fistbump.

"Showoffs," Soul grumbles.

They part ways on a crumbling curbside, Black Star having insisted on walking Soul and Maka to the bus stop. By the time he returns to the restaurant, his break is long since over, and Kim is firing up the fryers that he's just cleaned.

Two hours is a long time to be apart for friends who've spent so long separated. The last time he and Maka had seen each other in person, she was about to leave for Maryland, and he was sporting a black eye that would not fade until the early snow had melted. He'd wished her luck at college, and she'd told him that she wouldn't need it.

Maka had been the sister he never had, in ways not limited to making his grades look worse by comparison.

The clock strikes six, and Black Star doesn't wait to be freed from his food service shackles, whipping off his visor and heading for the back door with the determination of a man on a goddamn mission.

Kilik stops him on his way out.

"We need to talk," he says, and the words wrap around Black Star's chest and choke out the tiny shred of hope he had of avoiding this conversation.

Black Star sighs. "I know." And he does, he knows that this is something that must be faced; it's the actualization of that concept that he struggles to accept, because the reality is not an easy back and forth, it is pregnant pauses and avoiding looks and all these tiny fucking indicators of discomfort that weren't there before, not with them.

Kilik rubs the bridge of his nose, pushing up his glasses as he does. "You haven't been acting like it. Ignoring me isn't gonna make me stay."

"I know," repeats Black Star.

"So why are you being like this? Can't you just talk to me?"

"No, not really!" It comes out so much harsher than he meant.

The silence that follows is worse than the conversation he didn't want to have.

Black Star has known Kilik Rung since they were eighteen and equally lonely, brought together by a shared workplace and propensity for socialization. Since then they have been two rocks in a turbulent sea of adult responsibility, each a point of stability for the other to hold to when the tide comes crashing in.

Kilik reaches out with stormclouds wrapped around his fingertips, and Black Star pushes him away.

Words are heavy things. It takes a herculean effort to force them from his stiffened throat. "I'm not mad at you—"

"Could've fooled me."

"Then you can think I am if you want! I don't care! You can tell me how much of an asshole I'm being when I don't have somewhere to be." Black Star's head is buzzing and he wants to be anywhere but here and Kilik is _still in the fucking way_.

It's the hurt in his gaze that makes Black Star want to dematerialize.

"Okay," Kilik says, in a voice like a rubber band about to snap, "this is what I don't get. You say you know we need to talk, then you pull this. Like, if you don't want to talk about it, fine. At least you're acknowledging that it's still an issue. But I am leaving. And you being a shitty friend isn't gonna make me stay."

"I'm not—"

"You really are."

And maybe he is, maybe his selfishness has gotten the better of him, maybe he should be happier for Kilik and less hostile towards someone else's good fortune.

At least Kilik doesn't watch the evening news.

The door closes behind him not with a slam but with the whimper of old hinges.

 _COWARD,_ hisses the oily voice from the back of his mind, loud enough to be heard over the thud of old sneakers on pavement. He tells it to fuck off, but like the rest of him his subconscious, is not so easily commanded. It whispers unpleasant truths as he boards the bus with the last handful of change in his pocket, it snarls harsh reminders as though he didn't know these things already, as if there wasn't a reason he'd tried to forget. But he is stronger than an composite of unwanted thoughts, and by the time he gets of the bus he has wrangled his fears back into their cage.

Maka and Soul are visible through the front window of Ocho Burger. Black Star hopes he can forget about his best friend long enough to inhale a greasy dinner.

The man at the counter is tall and burly in the way that razor blades are sharp and thin — not as an example, but as an extreme of the terms. His mere presence is a challenge, and though Black Star lets it go unanswered, it almost makes him regret that he's taking time off from proving himself. He commits the title on his cashier's clip-on name tag to memory, and, deep within the disorganized recesses of his mind, files it under 'People to Fight'.

There's a thin strip of bandage covering the bridge of the man's nose. Black Star wonders who broke it.

"That's the guy that fought Justin, you know" Soul informs Black Star after Maka's waved him down and all food on the table has been reorganized to make ownership clear.

"Who, Biceps McHairgel?"

Soul nods in the cashier's direction. "Yeah, that's him. I heard that he's had some kind of beef with Justin for years. No one knows why, but they hate each other's guts. That's what Liz told me, anyway."

"Who's Justin?" asks Maka.

"Justin," Soul informs her, "is our Jesus freak of a district manager. Liz says he goes to church every single day or something. He was in a Christian rock group once." He pauses to finish the last bites of a very large burger. "He's a douchebag."

"Forget about Justin though," Black Star interjects. "Maka, you've been away marooned on some distant shore for ages—"

"I go to law school in Maryland."

"Same thing. The point is you've been gone forever, and you're awful at texting me back. What do you even _do_ in law school?"

Maka grins, and it's the same look she used to get when she was about to tell one of her favorite stories.

"I'm so glad you asked."

The thing about Maka's stories is that they are not brief, nor have they ever been. She spins her yarns with every bit of wool she can salvage, weaving together memories good and bad with a needle-sharp tongue. She tells them about her grades, her friends, her future, and speaks with the pride of someone who knows that they're going places sooner rather than later. She's got her whole career path lined up already, she tells them, and she's just _so excited_ to finally work on real cases and help real people, and—

"How much do lawyers make a year?" Soul asks, cutting her off in the middle of an over enthused tirade. "If you're gonna be loaded someday, I've got first dibs on marrying you for your money."

Maka quickly googles an answer. "On average, over 130,000 dollars," she says. "But I wouldn't count on marrying rich for a long-term plan."

"You could try and seduce Kid if you really want a rich spouse, though," Black Star snorts.

Soul groans. "Dude, don't even joke about that…"

"Who's Kid?" Maka asks. "I know someone with that name, but we're probably not thinking of the same person."

"He's this rich boy that started working at Mortie's with us," Black Star explains. "Says his dad got him the job."

"He'd be hot if he didn't act so above us all," Soul grumbles.

"Sounds fascinating." Maka's tone is one of amused apathy. She pushes asides her two-dollar soda and leans back in her seat, not quite deep in thought, but at least dipping her toes in its shallow end.

"You know," she says, "I think we are thinking of the same Kid. He's got black hair with white streaks on the left side, right?"

Black Star nods, recalling the questions he'd had about his coworker's hairstyle. "Yeah, he does! Are they from stress or something? And how do you know him anyway?"

"I don't know where he gets the streaks," Maka says, which assures Black Star that Kid will remain at least somewhat mysterious, "but we were introduced by our parents when we were kids. Papa and his dad are old friends." The parental nickname falls from her lips like a pill that was too bitter to swallow, and Black Star finds himself envious of the way the venom has started to leave what was once her least favorite word.

They were once the same in their anger, in their rebellion, in the way they spit their fathers' names with all the vitriol of sulfuric acid. There had been a sense of camaraderie there, back then when they were young and jaded and presiding over burned bridges, but she repaired what could still be salvaged, and he will never have that chance.

"So it's your dad's fault that you had to put up with Kid," Black Star reasons.

Maka shrugs. "You could say that. But Kid's really not that bad! He's a really cool guy once you get to know him."

The fact that Black Star finds himself agreeing is something either much more or much less meaningful than it feels. Growing up means revising first impressions, maybe. This is how adults function.

Adults that they are, the three of them spend well over an hour at Ocho Burger, laughing into empty soda cups and trading well embellished tales of life in their respective stations. Soul pays for another round of burgers, and Black Star offers his hand in marriage as repayment. The engagement has been broken off by the time they leave, both parties having agreed that they're better off as friends, as burgers aren't the most solid foundation for a marriage anyway.

The sun is down and their phones are out, each with something else to show the others as they make their way home, because ninety minutes of fast food-fueled conversation somehow wasn't enough for them to tell all their stories. Black Star talks the loudest, but Maka talks the most, accompanying each picture she flips to with a full description of the context and events. Her college looks like Hogwarts on a budget.

They part ways at a bus stop again, this time with two on the curbside and one on the bus.

"I'll be back at your place in a few hours, okay?" Maka tells Soul as he boards.

"That's cool. We'll talk later. You and Star have fun catching up." He waves goodbye with a languid smile and sleepy eyes.

"He's going to pass out the minute he gets home," Maka sighs. "I hope he does it in an actual bed instead of on the couch."

"The last time he was at my place he fell asleep on the floor," Black Star tells her. "He was pretty high, but he'd probably have done it sober too." She laughs, and they walk down the street with wide smiles and high spirits.

They don't consciously decide to walk to the park, but they end up there anyway, partly because it's close by and partly because they have nowhere better to go. Streetlights cast their sicky orange glow through the noise of leaves and branches, reflecting off the metal playground in uneven patches like a poorly managed light show.

Maka takes a seat on a rusty swing and Black Star clambers to the top of the monkey bars, always on top even when his throne is something designed for first-graders with short legs and sticky palms.

"I came here as a kid, you know," he says, surveying his domain of tire swings and plastic slides. "I got my first broken nose at this very playground."

"It's pretty great that it's still here, right?" Maka speaks with a smile that fades once the words leave her lips. She was never good at hiding her worry, but she's gotten better in the time between this visit and her last, and Black Star doesn't realize what she's here for until the facade falls back and it's too late to leave.

"I heard about your dad," she says, and her voice is a funeral reception. She's already speaking like his father exists in the past tense; she won't even look him in the eye and if it were anyone else, he would be saying that he doesn't want their fucking pity.

But it's Maka, and they've known each other too long and shared too many secrets for him to close off to her now.

"Where'd you hear about it."

"Lots of places. I'm a criminal law student, and, well... your dad was a pretty well-known criminal." Was. Not is, not presently still drawing numbered breaths, waiting to die in an orange jumpsuit. He tries not to think about it too much, tries to not be angry over an unintended and inconsequential slight.

His father will be a 'was' soon enough anyway. In getting used to it, he can learn to stop caring.

"We talked about his case in one of my classes," Maka continues, hastily filling the spaces in an a painful conversation. "That's where I first heard about it. But he was on TV a few nights later too, and on the radio when I drove to the airport, and…" She trails off, and he doesn't pick up her slack.

The night air is warm and humid, with the atmosphere of an arcade just after closing. All the trappings of something enjoyable exist, but they lie hollow in the dark and quiet.

Insects flock to the streetlights like paparazzi to a red carpet event. The distant sizzle of tiny lives blinking out makes for morbid white noise.

It's never been like this, not with them. They're unaccustomed to long silences and heavy hearts. When Maka's parents split, it was raised voices and solidarity and welcoming her to the fold of broken homes; when college came and Maka moved, it was jokes about frat boys and promises to call often and the reassuring thought of 'distance can't harm us.' Death is a swift killer of simple conversation.

Black Star balances on the edge of the monkey bars and backflips off, sticking an unsteady landing to the resounding applause of an easy crowd.

"Thanks for clapping," he says, taking a seat next to her on the rusted swings.

Her smile might be sad, but emotions are hard to read under the limited brightness of flickering streetlights. The ambiguity is a small blessing.

"No problem."

The space between her sentences is just barely walking distance.

"...Do you think you'll go visit him?"

Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale. Black Star wonders how Soul can smoke when it's hard enough just to breathe.

He knows he's not nearly relaxed enough to pass off his answer as apathetic, so he doesn't try.

"I don't know. It's been a long goddamn time since I last saw him and he's never done anything to deserve a send off from me, but..." The last time his voice cracked was seventh grade. "...he's still my dad, you know?"

Maka nods with the sagacity and sympathy of another complicated situation.

"I'd be happy to never see him again," Black Star continues. "So if I don't go, he gets offed and I don't have to worry about him anymore. But what if I regret not taking this last chance to tell him to suck it years down the line? I might go just to take a load off future me's shoulders."

It's a pathetic attempt at comedy, and in the Olympics for mental gymnastics it barely scrapes a bronze medal. A last visit to an estranged father does not require an insult as justification.

"I see," Maka says. "It's been, what, six years since you saw him?" The concern still hasn't left her voice. Black Star wishes it would.

"Something like that."

It's been seven years, but he's not counting.

"That's... a long time," Maka says, as empathetic as one can make a statement of the obvious. She lets out a sigh that Black Star barely hears over the passing cars and the rustling leaves, soft and heavy like new snow.

"I'm worried about you," she says.

Black Star gives her the grace of a neutral response.

"Huh."

He hasn't stopped her there with some affronted comment about not needing to be worried over, so she plows ahead. For the both of them, talking is easier than listening.

"I know you like to act like you're above giving a shit about him," she says, "but I know that this has to be hard. That's the whole reason I came out here."

"You know you could have just called me, right?"

"Yeah, well, I'm a good friend and you have to deal with that."

Black Star laughs, and the image of his father's mugshot fades from his mind. There are somewhere around seventeen people in the world that Black Star would call his friends, and only two of them would book a short-notice flight just to surprise him with a comforting presence.

"Eeeh, you're okay at best. Nothing compared to me."

"Excuse you, asshole!" There's a smile on Maka's face now, and just like that, they're back to the easy banter of warm insults and playful shoves, speaking the language of childhood friends. She elbows him in the shoulder and he pushes her off her swing, not bothering to block the woodchips she throws in retaliation.

When he's brushed her projectiles from his jeans and she's recovered her seat the silence rushes up as a flood, lapping at their ankles and submerging them in dark and uncomfortable depths until Black Star's voice breaks the surface.

"So do you think I should go?"

The streetlights flicker. Superstition is something invented by those with no faith in themselves, yet there are times when Black Star finds room to believe. The churches of self and of clovers can exist side by side.

A slim hand tightens around the chain of a child's swing set.

"I think you should."

Maka speaks with confidence even when unsure of herself, and Black Star admires her for it, but he's known her long enough to learn the tremors in her voice that belie a lack of certainty. Right now the space between her lips is the San Andreas fault.

Black Star nods as though he's already made up his mind. "Thanks."

Kicking his legs forward, he sets the swing in motion, arcing higher and higher until he makes his aerial dismount. Behind him, Maka stands up and waits for him to clear the stage.

"I should head back," she says, ignoring his perfectly executed front flip in favor of a practical discussion.

Black Star nods, looking at the color of the sky and the time on his phone and accepting that yeah, maybe it is getting late. "You want me to walk you back to the bus stop?"

"What a gentleman. Yes."

He holds out his hand in an exaggerated mockery of chivalry, and she flicks him in the center of his forehead. Friendship is a long series of small gestures and not all of them are painless.

They do not walk to their chosen waystation without exchange of words, as neither of them are particularly prone to shutting their mouths when in good company, but the things that leave their lips carry the weight of an elephant in the room, and Maka's never been good at casual pretense when she's got something on her mind.

A short man with a long nose with his unnecessarily large briefcase occupy the sole bench at the bus stop, forcing the pair of them to remain standing. The close proximity grants Black Star a clear glimpse at a long string of texts when Maka pulls out her phone. All of them are from Soul; half contain only emojis.

"Is he getting clingy already?" Black Star asks, craning his head to look over her shoulder more visibly.

Maka shoves her phone out of sight with burning cheeks.

"And what's that supposed to mean?" she retorts, demonstrating skill in deflection tactics that fool no one.

"Well, usually he waits till at least the third week of a relationship to get annoying."

A Kool-Aid Man impersonator would envy the hue of Maka's features.

"We're not dating! You know I'm already seeing Crona—"

"And I also know that that's an open relationship. I can see why you'd wanna hide your thing with Soul, though! No judgement there; he's a real loser."

"Oh my god." Being positioned side by side doesn't lend itself well to eye contact in the first place, but Maka goes the extra mile in turning her face away from him. When she speaks again, her voice is hesitant rather than flustered, a quick shift with a large disparity.

"It's nothing official," she says, her gaze fixed on some distant street sign, "so we really aren't dating at all. We don't want to deal with long distance, and I'm probably going to stay on the East Coast once I graduate, so… it's like that."

Black Star nods, mulling this unsolicited information over. "That does sound tough. But you know I just wanted to make fun of your taste in men, right?"

"He's your best friend."

"Yeah, but I wouldn't _date_ him."

The headlights of a derelict city bus appear at the end of the street, and any retort forming on Maka's lips dies as her practical side responds to their impending separation.

"Are you working tomorrow?" she asks. "I'm leaving on Monday, so we should hang out while we can."

"My shift ends at five; we can drag Soul out for dinner with us."

She smiles as the bus arrives in a cloud of city stink and squealing brakes. They say goodbye with a hug and a promise to see each other soon, and Maka waves goodbye as the metal doors close.

As the bus drives away, Black Star can see Maka shaking blond hair free of her pigtails. She looks like someone older with her hair down.

It's a twenty minute walk from here to home, and for once, Black Star makes it at that pace. His stage is set, but he needs more time to himself than a performance of speed allows. Walking feels like dragging his feet, and the the dim noises of distant cars provide a perfect backdrop for the kind of self-reflection he'd mock in an action movie protagonist.

There's no point in pondering your problems if you don't take action to fix them, but sometimes pondering is all you can do. He's learning this now, a few years too late to prevent dumb mistakes, but just in time to spare him a lot of frustration.

So, he lets his train of thought take off with no conductor, passing through stations previously unmapped. He walks down city blocks on autopilot, lost in his own head and in thoughts of law schools and distant lovers until a jarring realization shakes him back to self-awareness.

Has he always been jealous of Maka?

She was jealous of him when they were younger, he knows that, back when he was the king of kickball and she was a bookworm with legs like limp noodles. But that was the childish envy of someone wanting to belong, and neither of them are children now. He's older and no wiser and something in him must have twisted over the last few years, because he resents his closest friend for daring to fly higher than him.

It's not her fault for being smart and determined and on a clear path to success. There's never been any doubt in his mind that Maka would be someone important someday; he's had time now to adjust to her future greatness.

He'd just expected to be someone important too.

Six years is a long time to live a life of constants, to work the same job and know the same people. Sure, he's lived under different roofs and done his share of affordable traveling, but in all this goddamn time he's only managed to stay the same, and when held against the map of someone else's journey, the steps he has made seem very small.

The concrete stairwell of his apartment complex is a sight for sore eyes. Black Star takes the steps two at a time, footsteps echoing off the dull walls like bad sound effects on an indie movie set. Stains too faded to be new decorate the space with the personality of accidents past, and he wonders why he's never noticed.

After an uneventful climb taken at a the pace of a dialup modem, Black Star finds himself standing in front of his apartment with empty hands and searched pockets, reflecting on the importance of grabbing your keys. Once again Tsubaki proves his saving grace, answering his thunderous knocks with remarkable speed.

"Hey, I heard that Maka's in town!" she says, relocking the door while he makes a beeline for the kitchen. "You must have already known, but have you seen her yet? It's been so long since she's visited."

Black Star swallows a bite of leftover pizza. "Oh, yeah! She showed up at McMortie's during my break, and we hung out with Soul after work. It was awesome."

He didn't always exist in this state of mixed emotions, but at least he's got options in his interactions. He nearly always opts for his cheerful self. The Black Star that thinks about the future and regrets his choices is a real drag.

Tsubaki smiles. "I'm glad you had fun! I wish I could have been there… I barely saw Maka the last time she visited."

"She's here for the whole weekend. You guys'll find time to catch up," Black Star assures her. "You can tell her about all the cool shit I've done since she last visited, and she can talk your ear off about her classes and stuff." In the middle of washing the grease from his hands, he pauses to examine the remaining grime with poorly crafted neutrality. "They're talking about my dad's case in her fancy law courses, y'know."

"Oh."

A split-second sound can carry great meaning if it's uttered with just the right tone.

"...Do you know what they're saying?" Tsubaki asks, and Black Star thanks whoever's listening that the first words out of her mouth were not 'I'm sorry.'

He quickly dries his hands on his faded shorts. "Nope. It's probably just the same stuff that all the news stations and whatever are saying — 'Damn, this guy was fucked up; good thing he's on his way out.' Who cares though, right? It's not like I'm ever gonna run into any of Maka's classmates."

'Never assume' is the motto of those who have yet to face hard truths. He'd rather make assumptions than ask for unhappy answers, and god, he really doesn't want to face how much more the world cares about his asshole father than it does about him.

The man that Black Star tries to forget has classes, news segments, radio bulletins, Sunday morning newspaper cover spreads, all dedicated to him and the things he's done.

Black Star is a footnote on his father's Wikipedia page.

Better to just leave those briefly mentioned law school discussions as an amalgam of vague ideas than suffer a detailed account of how fucking fascinated her classmates are by someone he wants the world to forget.

Tsubaki responds with the reluctant tone of someone who knows that it doesn't matter what they say. "I guess you're right about that." The air conditioner kicks in during the space between her sentences. "I found some of your missing weights, by the way. I put them in the closet with the rest of your stuff in case you need them."

"I don't _need_ anything to exercise, Tsubaki." His ego relents at a skeptical eyebrow raise. "But yeah, okay, those do help. Where'd you find them?"

"In a box in my closet. I think you put them there when we moved in and forgot about it?"

"Sounds like me. You mind if I use the living room for a workout?"

Tsubaki smiles. "Be my guest."


	4. Hold Time

Black Star wakes up with greasy hair, sore limbs, and more texts than he usually gets in a week. Of those things, the hair is his most immediate concern. He pulls himself off the couch and directly into a set of dumbbells left lying on the ground.

The sound of a curse screamed at full volume brings Tsubaki running. Somewhere in between "Oh god are you okay what happened stay still" and "I swear on my fucking life if I miss work because you had to go to the hospital" she produces an ice pack, the only known form of medical care in their household.

"I'm being punished for exercising," Black Star gripes, tending to his foot by way of makeshift cold compress. "God doesn't want me to get buffer than him, so he's trying to sabotage my workout plans. I was gonna go running tonight!"

"Can you blame him? You're pretty stiff competition for an ancient being of pure power." Tsubaki opens the shutter shades of the living room windows. The sun is rising with the reluctance of a groggy teenager. "I bet you'll beat him someday."

"Duh. Hey, have you seen my phone?"

After a few moments of ineffectively checking obvious locations, Tsubaki pulls the missing device from beneath the couch.

"Do you and Soul always talk this much?" she asks, handing him his phone with the screen lit up. Black Star takes it from her and checks his messages. A slew of unanswered texts fill his screen, a good ninety percent of them from his aforementioned friend. For someone so content to keep his mouth closed during meatspace interaction, Soul has an uncanny talent for texting a small novel's worth of overnight status updates. Halfway through the wall of messages about Soul and Maka's movie marathon, Black Star's eyes glaze over, and he scrolls through the sordid details of late-night hand-holding. He might be willing to take a bullet for Soul, but he's got no interest in reading the extended cut of a close friend's quasi-romantic pursuits.

Tacked on two hours after the great American love story are a set of messages with actual bearing on his life:

" _oh also liz says were having kiliks party sunday and ig i needed to be the one to tell you think bc shes convinced that you only listen to me and tsubaki"_

" _idk whats going on with you and kilik rn but at least show up ok party starts at 8 were closing down the restaurant early and having it there did liz tell you that already or not"_

" _bring root beer"_

Sunday.

Tomorrow.

Shit, he'd have appreciated a little more advance warning.

He slumps back against the worn fabric of the couch cushions, tapping his phone to his forehead as though the contact will help him think.

It would be easy enough to skip the send-off. There's nothing more effortless than non-action. But no, he can't do that, because someone's got the bring the root beer, and there is no world in this theoretically infinite multiverse in which he'd let his friends throw a party without him.

And all that aside, Kilik will expect him to be there.

He's never been one to let down a friend.

The old couch creaks as he stands up with a rush. Pacing the cramped space of the living room floor does nothing for his ability to compose a text, but he's on his feet when the message sends.

" _what's going on w us is that i'm gonna be at his party and its gonna kick ass and by the end of the night someone's gonna crown me the party king"_

Soul responds with the haste of someone who has nothing better to do.

" _sounds gr8 but seriously dont start a fight with him ok"_

" _i'm not going to!"_

" _im holding you to that one dude"_

" _who else is gonna be there?"_

" _uhhh you me maka liz patty tsubaki kim and kid  
steins gonna be there bc hes in charge of the place but i think hes just planning on holeing up in his office for most of it  
kilik too obviously"_

" _kid's coming?"_

" _yeah why"_

The unwritten part of Soul's message reads _'why are you surprised?'_

His subtext has a point — Kid is an employee of the restaurant, same as the rest of them. No matter the length of his tenure, he has has a right to attend, to celebrate, to get blackout drunk and wake up with a missing wallet and a new tattoo and everything else that their little group's parties have historically entailed. There's no reason for Black Star to have thought otherwise.

There's no reason for him to be glad about Kid being there either, but that's somehow less surprising.

It takes several seconds of wordlessly staring into space for Black Star to realize that he's ceased his pacing. The observation elicits an incomprehensible curse and a quick reply, tapping out and sending a text before heading for the barbells, ready to kill time with the rhythmic exhaustion of repeated motions.

" _idk i wasn't expecting him to be interested in parties"_ is all the answer Soul needs.

It's nice to have the escape of exercise and action to fall back on when being social becomes boring or worse. There's a strange kind of relief that comes with switching his phone to silent before a workout, usually. Today it feels lonely to close off a conversation, even with Tsubaki in the next room and the company of coworkers on the horizon.

There's no joy in the strain of weightlifting, no sense of accomplishment gained as his repetition count climbs higher and higher. Somewhere between confusion and irritation, Black Star wonders what changed between yesterday and now to suck the life from his favorite routine. He wonders if he could punch out the concept of inner turmoil if he tried hard enough.

Probably not, but it might be worth a try anyway.

He sets down his equipment and picks up his phone. His list of contacts is blessedly short, limited to those fortunate enough to call him their friend — the small size of that particular pool makes Maka's contact information a cinch to fish out. She picks up on the second ring.

"It's way too early for you to call me," she says.

Black Star raises an eyebrow that she won't see. "You live in a different timezone; you're always up way before me."

"Fair point. What's up?"

"Would you wanna hang out if I skipped work?"

"No, because you need to not get fired."

While technically true, the risk of unemployment seems a fair price to pay for a fun day out. And besides that—

"Stein's not gonna fire me! I've done WAY worse than skip work since I've been working here. Once I fought a guy in the parking lot and all he did was ask to watch."

There's a pause from the other end.

"That doesn't sound very legal." It's difficult to tell from tone if her implied concern is legitimate. Though most of their occasional early-morning conversations lack enough gravity for their words to float through the ceiling, they've had a few times and a few things more than capable of bringing them back down to earth. School, work, romance, futures and lack thereof — at least they both have someone to whom they can vent. With all they've said and done, they should know each other's moods and mannerisms better than they know the rhythm of their cell phone's ringtone.

You'd think that he'd be better at reading a girl he's known for so long. That being said, it's not as though her relative severity would affect his response anyway.

Black Star snorts and runs a hand through the sleep-crushed spikes of his over-gelled hair.

"Probably super illegal, yeah. Hey, if I got arrested for skipping work, d'you think they'd write about me in your fancy law school textbooks?"

"No thanks, we already have a fascinating section on a kleptomaniac pleading insanity that's taking up valuable page space." This time he can hear the smile in her voice.

"What?! Come on, there's no way that some shoplifter's more interesting than me!" There's a stifled laugh from the other end of the line, and he finds that a smile's come across his face as well.

Maka's voice sounds like the light-hearted banter of an after-school conversation. "You're _something_ ," she says, "that's for sure. Promise me you won't go off and try to to top the stories from my textbooks, though. And if you can't do that, at least put the theatrics off until after you get done with work."

Black Star frowns. "What're you talking about? I told you, I'm gonna skip out on that so we can hang. I was gonna grab the bus over to Soul's place in half an hour."

Even over the phone, with no gulf between them to fill with palpable tension and things unsaid, the words manage to hang in the cotton-thick air, coloring the silence a sickly hue.

Maka coughs. "Mm. About that."

"What?"

"Me and Soul already made plans together. We were kind of looking forward to having some time together, just the two of us."

It takes a talent that Maka doesn't have to make the rejection seem less harsh. She's being more cryptic now, but the subtext of 'we don't want you here' is about as clear as the print on a billboard, and he wants to know why he's being made to read it. Did he piss her off last night somehow? Are she and Soul up to something and cutting him out of the action? Or—

Black Star's face splits in a wide grin. "Alright, alright, I read you loud and clear. I'll stay out of your hair for now."

"Thanks. I really—"

"But you'd better use a condom for those 'plans' of yours, got it?"

God, what he'd pay to see the look on Maka's face right now. If the garbled shriek is any indication, it's gotta be hilarious.

"That's not— stop making assumptions like that!" If they were face to face, she might have decked him, but luck and distance are both on his side. Black Star laughs, loud and raucous, momentarily drawing Tsubaki out from the shelter of her bedroom to see what's causing the fuss.

"Yeah, yeah, whatever you say. Don't think I'm gonna hang up without congratulating you first, though!"

The line goes dead.

About a minute later, his phone rings again, and it's her name displayed on the lock screen. He picks up with a smug grin.

"Hello?"

"Meet us at Soul's place after you're done with work. I'll Maka Chop your ass then."

She hangs up on him once more before he has the chance to say a temporary goodbye. For once, he lets her get the last word. This is just a pause in an ongoing conversation, and he'll always have another chance to open his mouth.

A soft breeze blows in through the screen windows. There had been a storm predicted for this weekend, but the clouds in the sky are small and white, drifting across an endless sea like little fish in a big pond.

It's going to be a good day, maybe.

"Hey, Tsubaki, y'wanna walk to work with me?" The scattered clouds have fled the by the time Black Star sticks his head into his roommate's quarters, intruding to ask her the favor of company. Tsubaki has her shoes on before he's done talking.

It doesn't take long to for them to reach the bus stop with Black Star setting the pace. The thud of his sneakers on the hard concrete is the rhythm that his world moves to for that four-minute walk, and it's nice to have that small scrap of control while it lasts. However, the buses of the city march to the beat of their own rusting drums, and his chariot of screeching brakes and urban stink arrives a full twelve minutes off schedule.

"Why'd that take so long?" Black Star grumbles, twisting his uniform visor to the side as though he wants for his fashion to reflect his mood. He takes a step towards the vehicle, only to be stopped by a hand on his shoulder.

"Ladies first, right, Black Star?" Tsubaki says.

Black Star blinks. "You're coming all the way?"

"Mhm. I've got some business to take care of."

The seat nearest the bus's door has the dark stains of past bloody knuckles imprinted in its patterned fabric. Somehow, the sight comes as a relief.

Tearing himself away from the breathtaking vistas of a unremarkable city, Black Star cocks his head to look at Tsubaki.

"So what's your 'business' anyway?"

The faded gray of the scuffed floor must be absolutely captivating to Tsubaki. Even with her head down and the curtains of her bangs drawn, Black Star can see a lump form in her throat.

A moment later, she swallows it.

"Talking about your father got me thinking about… some things that I regret," she says, her voice the controlled calm of an ER nurse. "I'm going to go visit Masamune."

The bus pulls up to a stop, halting in a rush of noise and shifting passengers. Black Star lets her words fade into the chaos of strangers disembarking, not opening his mouth until the doors close and the wheels turn once again.

"There's no flower shops in this part of town, you know," he says. "I'll come buy some with you if you want."

Tsubaki shakes her head. "I don't need any this time."

"You're sure?"

"I think so."

He nods, and the moment passes. They ride on in what would be silence if not for the constant chaos of their surrounding world.

Kid is standing outside the restaurant when they arrive at the asphalt oasis of the parking lot, leaning against the hood of a black car that costs more than what they make in a year and adjusting his fancy watch. He probably doesn't even realize how arrogant he seems, Black Star thinks. To him this is as normal as cable marathons of old films.

Black Star raises a hand in greeting as he and Tsubaki draw near his coworker. "Yo, Kid! Are you on break or something?" Kid looks up to face him, and the fucking _pity_ in his eyes cuts Black Star deeper than any dagger-sharp stare.

Kid speaks with the uneven reluctance of premature guilt. His thin fingers twist the ornament on his wrist, he shifts his weight as if on edge, he rubs his elbow when he lowers his arms, and Black Star notices all these things because he is looking anywhere, anywhere but Kid's eyes.

"I'm sorry," Kid says. "I had no idea about your father."

Something angry and foul that stings like acid rises in Black Star's throat, but he swallows it down, like he does every goddamn time someone dares to treat him like spun glass. He doesn't need anyone walking on eggshells out of misplaced concern, he doesn't need 'I'm sorry', and he doesn't need to be having this fucking conversation with the perceived rejection of his best friend and the acrid stink of his morning commute both still fresh in his mind.

Black Star shrugs dismissively. "Yeah, well, if I'd wanted you to know I'd have told you. It's not even that big of a deal. We're square, newbie."

"...You don't care?"

"Why would I?"

For the barest moment, Kid hesitates. The split second of empty space gives Black Star a false hope of escape, and then Kid opens his mouth.

"Well, he is your father, isn't he?"

The vitriol bubbling just beyond Black Star's tongue slips out not as a gentle stream, but the distant rumblings of a coming storm.

"And what's it matter if he is? Being a father doesn't mean much if all you do for your kid is drag his family name into the national spotlight. Shit, I wanted fame, but I wanted it on my own terms — not as a five-second segment on dime-a-dozen reports about Old Man Fuckup! Riddle me this, huh — why should I care about someone who's never cared about me?"

"Black Star—" Tsubaki's hand goes to rest on his shoulder, and he brushes it off. This isn't the time for her small kindness. Something's been building in the back shelves of his brain since someone first used his father's name in the same sentence as 'condemned', a snarl of resentment that's grown to a roar. It took this little to set him off, blades sharpened the instant Kid showed him sympathy for the loss of a parent he'd be better off without, and he's no longer sure it's worth it to practice the art of emotional repression.

He wants to lash out at something, to hurt and be hurt and work through his problems in the language of fists and bruises, he's wanted to for days, and here Kid is with a mouth full of thorns and a nose that would look better broken.

"I'm sorry," Kid says.

The tension in the air could be cut and packaged if anyone dared to move and try.

Kid scratches the side of his head in a manner that seems more anxious than habitual. "I've just always had a good relationship with my father—"

This isn't the movies.

There is no satisfying crack when Black Star's fist meets the fine bones of Kid's features, just the sting of wounded knuckles and the buyer's remorse of a bad decision. The next morning there will be a bruise staining his hand.

Kid staggers backwards, clutching his jaw like his shaking fingers are the only things keeping it attached. "What the fuck was that for?!" he shouts through bloody lips, "Shit, you didn't—" He cuts off with a pained gasp, and Black Star doesn't see him clenching his fist until it's too late.

It _hurts_. Kid doesn't punch like someone with pianist's fingers and expensive cologne, he punches like he's got a score to settle and years worth of high school fistfights to back him up. Tsubaki gasps in horror and Black Star tastes blood, stumbling a few steps back as he fails to absorb the brunt of the blow. His wound is already aching, and he's glad that Kid hit back, because he has self-defense as excuse this time when he lunges toward towards a man who once had the chance of being his friend.

He barely gets in another hit before something grabs him by the back of his uniform shirt, dragging him and his fists away from Kid.

"Didn't we agree to no fighting your coworkers?" Stein asks, releasing Black Star's half-popped collar once there's a few feet of distance between them and Kid. "I doubt that you had a good reason for this, so we can skip the part where I ask you what happened."

"What happened is as much my fault as his." Kid's voice wavers on delivery but his conviction is clear, and Black Star's almost tempted to punch him again for taking any share of the fall. "I provoked him, it's my—"

Before Black Star can interject with his words or his fists, Stein puts his hand on Black Star's shoulder — a restraint more effective than handcuffs.

"I'd recommend stopping there," he says, his tone more stern than Black Star has heard it in years. In a large majority of the population, the faction of humanity equipped with a survival instinct, Stein's presence alone would be enough to prevent further misconduct. Black Star, who has always thought himself a cut above the general populace, puts up a solid ten seconds of angry resistance until he he backs off. The sigh of relief from Kid is just loud enough to be audible.

"You got it, boss man," Black Star grumbles, raising his hands in the universal sign of defeat.

Stein nods and releases Black Star from his iron grip. "You remember what I said last time this happened, right?" The question is both rhetorical and redundant; they both know damn well that Black Star doesn't remember that which, in his mind, doesn't matter, and a warning from his employer fit quite squarely under that title.

"I—"

Tsubaki finally breaks from her shock-induced paralysis, cutting Black Star off just in time to save him from admitting his ignorance.

"You're not going to fire him over this, are you?" she asks, her eyes wide and afraid. "He's worked here for six years, that's got to count for something!"

"Fry cooks don't get tenure," Stein says dryly. "But no, I'm not going to fire him." In general, Tsubaki is not the type of person to cry at good news, but she looks on the verge of making an exception.

It's maddening how they talk about him as if he's not there, yet Black Star manages to hold his tongue for one of first times in his relatively short life.

Kid emits a pained gasp. All heads turn towards the man they'd half-forgotten. Blood from his split lip seeps from between his fingers, wet and lurid against bone-white skin. It would be poetic if the imagery wasn't ruined by Kid cursing through his clenched teeth.

"Ah, dammit." Stein uses the phrase like a midwestern homebody mildly inconvenienced by bad cell reception. "Tsubaki, take him inside and make sure nothing's broken. And if it is, make sure he knows that I'm not liable for that."

"Right." Tsubaki nods and takes Kid by the arm, Kid still muttering curses as she locks her arms with his. She gently tugs them towards the welcoming glass doors of the restaurant, and Kid remains rooted to the ground. His eyes fix not on Black Star, but on the ground before him, and on the drops of red marring one of the parking lot's orderly yellow lines.

His gaze slowly up from the pavement to lock with Black Star's, and Black Star is struck by how beautiful Kid is even with blood on his face. The remorse comes seconds after, crashing over him like the grey waves of an evening storm.

Kid's stare is calm and even, the kind of thing you expect from network super detectives and fictionalized CEOs. His eyes are piercing, not in the way that a beautiful woman's smile pierces your heart, but in the way that a well-thrown spear pierces your lung.

"I don't get you," he says. In the precious seconds lost to confusion, Kid turns on his heel and follows Tsubaki inside, leaving Black Star to bite back the delayed retort of "same to you." And just like that, the parking lot's population is down to him, Stein, and Kid's expensive car.

Stein lights a cigarette. "Let's go for a walk."

Raising his eyebrows doesn't quite cut it for expressing Black Star's current level of skepticism. "Are you gonna get me lost and ditch me or something? That's a coward's way out, you know — just man up and fire me if you're gonna."

"You're not getting fired."

"And I've got your word on that?"

Smoke exits Stein's mouth is a slow trickle. "For what it's worth, sure."

After a moment of thought, Black Star nods and folds his arms. "Alright, gotcha. Lead the way, boss man."

The blue sky and harsh sunlight overhead seem inappropriate for a conversation spurred by a swift right hook. Stein leads at a pace that must be painfully slow for someone with the legs of an overgrown spider, with Black Star trailing a few feet behind. Black Star kicks aside old wrappers like dead leaves, taking a childish comfort in the sound of something crunching beneath his feet.

Stein blows an uneven smoke ring. "Technically, I should fire you."

An undeniable fact doesn't really necessitate that kind of confirmation. Black Star picks up his pace for the two seconds needed to bring him in stride with his boss. Stein's got a good eight inches of height on him and direct eye contact isn't exactly feasible, especially with Stein looking foward, but that doesn't stop Black Star from trying to stare his employer down.

"So why don't you?"

A pause barely longer than a heartbeat is somehow enough for Stein to squeeze in an unspoken warning of 'you won't like what you're going to hear'.

"I don't fire you because you're a good kid, but the job market isn't going to be kind to you if I ever do cut you loose. If you were working anywhere else, you'd have been fired within your first two months here." He scratches his chin. "You remember how you punched a hole in the wall demonstrating some martial arts crap to Hiro, don't you?"

Something hard sticks in Black Star's throat. "Yeah," he mutters. "I do."

He isn't thinking about Hiro or the way his fist stung after he shoved it through the cheap plaster of the kitchen wall when he answers Stein in single syllables. Recalling that distant memory takes a backseat to half-formed betrayal.

Stein lets the words dissipate in the muggy air. For a moment, they walk on in silence, and then Black Star grinds to a halt.

It only takes a few steps of solo walking for Stein to notice. He turns back and faces Black Star from a distance of two pavement squares, his general effect of ominous looming mercifully limited by the glare of the sun and the faraway rush of highway traffic.

"Is something—"

"So you let me keep my job because you think I can't cut it anywhere else?" Black Star's voice shakes like a tightrope after the acrobat slips. "That's it? You're telling me I don't deserve this position?"

"I'm telling you that I think you deserve to be earning a living wage." The way Stein talks is a unspoken reassurance than his actions are not brought on by a lack of faith. He speaks to Black Star without the patronizing quality of a schoolteacher, the formerly ubiquitous similarity among those acting for someone else's 'benefit,' and there's a certain sense of comfort to be found in that implied respect.

Stein extracts his cigarette from his lips and flicks it into the empty street. "Like I said, you're a good kid. You work harder than anyone when you're focused, and, even with the physical altercations, you're not the worst employee I've ever had. Besides, I think you've got enough to deal with at the moment without being given the axe."

Black Star's eyes flash the color of poorly-managed anger. "Don't give me special treatment because of my shitty old man, you—"

In a scene already cartoonishly dramatic — a roadside showdown at a time dangerously close to high noon — Stein's silencing tactic of holding up a flat palm is both effective and perfectly fitting.

"That's not what I'm doing," he explains. "It's because of _your_ circumstances that I'm making that call."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"That I'm not going to have you deal with the stress of being fired on top of everything else you've got to sort through at the moment. After all of this blows over, sure, I might consider letting you go, but job insecurity and the death of a parent aren't things that mix well." There's a bitter note to the last phrase that implies personal experience. Black Star lets it pass without question. He drops his rebellious glare, nods his compliance, and resumes walking at a pace just barely slower than before. Stein shoves his hands in the pockets of his stained khaki shorts, and adapts to their decreased speed.

They pause at an intersection with a burnt-out traffic light, dutifully obeying the dim red bulbs demanding that they 'STO.'

Black Star tugs his visor down on his forehead, crushing his spiky bangs beneath its fabric band. "You don't have to look out for me. Tsubaki's already doing her share of that."

Stein arches a pale eyebrow. "And you think she's the only one? The last I heard, my stepdaughter voluntarily took a five a.m. flight out here to make sure that you were doing alright."

The light changes. They remain still.

"...Your step daughter?"

"Ah."

Suddenly, Black Star remembers a red-haired man on Stein's lock screen, and a man that he knew when he and Maka were younger. For the first time, it occurs to him that they may be one and the same. Before he can think about it too much, there is a hand on his sleeve, gently pulling him across the intersection before the 'STO' sign turns back on.

"Wait," Black Star protests, yanking his sleeve out of Stein's grip as they arrive at the next curb, a few feet away from an over-postered bus stop. "Forget your step daughter, where are we going anyway, huh? Either your sense of direction's just as wonky as your face, or you're making a serious mistake with finding the way back home."

"Hold out your hand"

"What?"

Despite his confusion, Black Star proffers an open palm. After some digging through what must been extremely cluttered pockets, Stein extracts a handful of single-dollar bills, and foists them onto Black Star.

"That's more than enough for bus fare. Go home. Tsubaki should be on her way there now herself, assuming that Kid didn't insist on being taken to the hospital." He makes a vague hand gesture. "Well, either way, she'll join you eventually."

Black Star looks at the cash in his hand, and back up at Stein. "...What?"

Stein gives him a look that effortlessly conveys an end to the conversation. "If the first thing you do when arriving at your workplace is punch a guy in the face, I don't think you're in a good state to be working." His expression softens to something that Black Star would call paternal if he had known a father who cared. "You're not going to work through whatever's going on with you now if you don't take care of yourself first."

In the six years since Black Star came to work at McMortie's, he and Stein have had more than their share of conversations, many not completely amicable on his end. This is not the longest discussion they've had, nor is it the most hostile or tense, but it is, quite notably, the first time that Stein has gone out of his way to impart on him some piece of advice. For that, it is something special.

Black Star is a person who marches to the beat of his own drum, but he knows how to play along when someone hands him their sheet music. He clenches the cash that Stein's given him in his hand, and nods with a determination more befitting someone about to journey to Mars than to an apartment complex.

"Got it. Thanks, boss."

Stein smiles and raises a hand in a lazy man's farewell wave. "Good luck." Though Stein has been known to be eccentric in his choices of phrasing, Black Star is certain that he's not being wished luck with his bus ride home.

Unlike the rest of the people in Black Star's life, Stein does not care to stick around at bus stops. Having said his goodbye. he leaves Black Star to wait alone with a fistful of dollars and an uneasy feeling of comfort.

The bus that Black Star takes home is clean.

He smells something vaguely chemical, and he wonders what was so grotesque that the otherwise apathetic public transport system took the time to scrub it out.

The TV is on when he gets home, though he doesn't remember it being that way when he left. He closes his eyes the instant he hears static and muffled voices, not wanting to be greeted with a familiar face when he's already inching towards the kind of thoughts that can't be willed away.

In American news, vast numbers of new stories break every day, each of them vying for the coverage it deserves. Statistically, forty-four of those will involve homicide. His father does not have a monopoly on the title of 'murderer.'

Yet when he hears the word through the crackling speakers, his fists clench and his heart goes so small and cold that a volcano's heat couldn't reignite its spark. All these miles between them, and his father can still douse his flames with a single word. The word coming from a stranger's mouth makes no difference in Black Star's appraisal of the situation.

The remote appears to have vanished from their small apartment by some particularly aggravating miracle, and so the sensationalized story rolls until Black Star remembers the buttons on the TV itself. He dives for the box like he's sliding into home base, and jams the largest button with an unnecessary force. The noise is satisfying in the same way as the thud of a closing door.

Never has watching a screen click off felt so satisfying and yet so like cowardice.

There's a part of him that wonders what they were saying, what new perspective could possibly be brought to a story easily summed up in two sentences.

Man commits murder; inevitably gets arrested. No one will care when he dies.

The sound of the door swinging open is like a thunderclap over the constant hum of traffic and air conditioning.

Typically, Tsubaki would have chided him for leaving the door unlocked, a justified action given that they've been robbed before thanks to his negligence. This time, she locks up in silence, and joins Black Star on the living room floor in a sympathetic silence.

She knows from experience that he will speak first if she lets him, and he proves her assumption right.

"I shouldn't have punched him," Black Star says after a few minutes of wordless meditation. "It's not his fault that he's got a decent dad. Or that he's getting Kilik's old register. None of that's on him."

Tsubaki doesn't put her hand over his, but she moves it close enough to be comforting. "Kilik was never the only one working at that register, you know."

"I know, I know," Black Star says, running a hand through the stiff spikes of his hair. "It just felt like it was his. And now he's getting replaced."

"No one's replacing him," Tsubaki assures him, her voice soft. "Friends can't be replaced just like that, and you'll still be his friend after he leaves, won't you?"

It occurs to Black Star how many hard conversations he's been having these days.

He lays back on the floor, folding his arms behind his head. The water-stain omen of death is still there, hanging above his head as a reminder that things could always be worse. It seems darker than it was before.

"I don't know," he admits. "I've been ignoring him since he broke the news. Who knows if we're gonna still be friends after all this?" A car horn goes off as he thinks on his next words. "If our friendship does end because of this, that's going to be on me. I'll take responsibility for that."

Tsubaki bites her lip and nods. "I guess that's one way of looking at things."

"Do you think he hates me for this?"

Outside, the sky is clear, the sun is shining, and there are surely birds singing somewhere out in the urban din. It's a beautiful day for negative self-reflection.

The words are barely past his lips before Tsubaki wraps her arms around his shoulders, squeezing him gently and comforting him more than she could possibly know. She hugs like a fisherman reels in a net, tight and secure, and Black Star makes no attempt to get free.

"He doesn't hate you," she says. "Kilik is upset with you, but I know that he doesn't hate you. I think he's just waiting for you to learn from your mistakes. He knows that you've been going through a rough time lately. If he's half the person I think he is, he won't hold this against you, not forever. After all, he's still your friend."

Slowly, like ancient gods stirring, Black Star's arms rise up to wrap around her, anchoring him to the only rock he has left.

"I'm sorry that you didn't get to visit your brother," he says.

Though Black Star can't see Tsubaki smile with her head on his shoulder, he can feel her relax against him, and he can hear the soft exhale that passes for a relieved laugh.

"I don't mind," she assures him. "It's not like he's going anywhere."

Black Star snorts at her rare display of morbid humor. "When my old man gets the axe, we can go visit 'em both together. It'll be fun."

"Is he… going to be buried, then?"

"No clue. If he's not, I can just pretend that he's rotting under some random old tombstone and say my piece to that. When there's a will, there's a way, Tsubaki."

Her quiet laughter is a patch of clear sky after a long storm. They're through the worst of what today could throw at them now, and at last, Black Star reels back his anchors for the port of her embrace. His seas are calmer now. He can weather the next rough patch on his own.

Tsubaki gets up first after they let go, politely taking a few steps back so that Black Star can backflip his way to a standing position rather than simply straightening his legs. She applauds politely, to which he gives an exaggerated bow.

"I'm always afraid that you'll hit your head on the ceiling when you do that," she comments.

Black Star rolls his eyes. "Don't you believe in me?"

The familiar buzz of a phone on silent distracts him from Tsubaki's response. "Hang on," he tells her, pulling his phone out to look at the most recent contact.

He's greeted by a text from Maka regarding their poorly-discussed plans for the evening, asking where they should meet and when and if he knows whether Soul likes fast food or Italian better for an evening meal. The answer is, of course, Italian, but in opening his messages to give her that response, it occurs to him that he has more important things on the table right now. He taps back to his list of conversations, and selects the long chain of emojis designated as Kilik's contact name.

Composing a text message should not feel like writing a fucking symphony on short notice, but his keyboard is currently more intimidating than the waiting eyes of a tuned orchestra.

" _i'm sorry about how i've been acting,"_ he types.

" _i'll be at the party tomorrow_

 _we can talk then if u want."_

After a moment's consideration, he follows up with _"it's also cool if you don't wanna talk"_ and powers his phone off completely. Waiting around by a phone for a boy to text back is something best left to lovestruck teenagers, not adults with weird complexes and better things to do. Soul's food preferences will have to be left to Maka's guesswork.

"All good?" Tsubaki asks, waiting for him to cast aside his other conversations before piping up again.

Black Star gives her a thumbs up. "You know it!"

And she does.


	5. Open-Door Policy

While powering off his phone and disconnecting himself from the stress of seeing a 'read' receipt under his messages to Kilik provides a temporary peace of mind, hindsight is 20/20, and hours later he sees his mistake.

"I know you like to show up late or whatever, but, dude, a full hour is really pushing it," Soul gripes, getting up to stretch at last after what he claims was "a goddamn century of sitting on our asses and waiting."

"The star always arrives late," Black Star insists. "The longer the wait, the bigger the payoff, right? You guys should be crying with joy over me being here. Aren't you even gonna ask what happened to my face?" He jabs a finger at Kid's handiwork for emphasis.

The coldness of Soul and Maka's twin expressions could replace the air conditioning at Ocho Burger for well over an year.

Black Star whistles. "Geez, tough crowd."

Soul leans back in his seat and shrugs. "You getting bruises isn't really anything to write home about."

"It's kind of concerning, but not really surprising anymore," Maka says, "What is surprising is that we had to call Tsubaki to tell you to get over here. We'd already been here for half an hour by then! "

Black Star groans loudly. "Alright, alright, I'm sorry, it won't happen again. Now can we go get something to eat already?"

"Well, here's the thing," Maka says, looking over at Black Star with the smugly sagacious look of one who knows she's about to take someone down a peg. "We ended up waiting so long, we went and got our dinner without you. So unless you've got your wallet on you, dinner is off the table."

There are times in every friendship where it becomes apparent that those closest to you may in fact be the devil. Maka knows just as well as Black Star does that when going anywhere in a hurry, grabbing essentials like money and a credit card is low on Black Star's list of priorities.

He fishes around in the empty depths of his pockets for a few moments to confirm what he already knows.

"...Ah."

"That's what I thought."

Having gotten a brief moment of glory out of the way, Maka rises from her seat and takes Black Star by the wrist, pulling him towards the counter behind her. She flashes him a broad smile. "I'll buy you dinner this time, but you owe me." And she'll hold him to that. Every debt that Black Star has ever owed his pigtailed partner in crime has been paid in full, even the ones from third grade involving chocolate and trading cards.

Food tastes better when it's not on your dollar, but Black Star would have inhaled his grease-filled meal at record speeds regardless of who was buying.

"So," he says, wiping his hands on his faded running shorts, "what'd you guys spend your day doing anyway? I mean, I've got a pretty good guess, but—"

"Not what you're thinking," Soul tells him flatly. "Unfortunately."

Maka elbows Soul in the side about as hard as she can manage. "We video called Crona. It wasn't supposed to be a very long conversation, but… it's easy to lose track of time with stuff like that." She blushes faintly, ignoring Soul hunching over in pain beside her.

Black Star nods. "How long did you talk for?"

"Four hours, I think," Soul grunts. "Could've been longer."

"Uh huh. So what'd you talk about?"

Soul and Maka exchange a look uncomfortably reminiscent of government agents in disaster movies.

"We — me and Crona — decided that our relationship isn't going to be an open one anymore. The upside of that is that me, Crona, and Soul are all dating each other. Soul's the only person besides Crona that I ever…" She blushes faintly. "… you know, had romantic feelings for. So it made sense to do this."

Despite their being in a public place, Black Star doesn't hesitate to jump to his feet and slam his hands on the table in his exuberance. "Why didn't you tell me that sooner?"

Soul raises an eyebrow. "You turned your phone off."

"Still! When there's a will, there's a way; you could've called Tsubaki and told her to hand me the phone."

Maka interjects before Soul can dispute Black Star's shoddily-crafted argument. " _Anyway_ ," she says pointedly, "you remember when I told you that we didn't think we could handle a long distance relationship, don't you?

A hard knot forms in the pit of Black Star's stomach, twisting his organs into incomprehensible shapes. If cut open and read as tea leaves, his insides would surely foretell tragedies.

"I want to move out to live with Maka and Crona if I can save up the money," Soul says, as straightforward as blunt-force trauma. "That's a few years off, since I'm barely making rent as is, but that's the plan right now." He pauses, only to continue when met with an uncharacteristic silence. "It's way too soon to be talking about this, to tell you the truth. A lot could change in those few years."

The seas are choppy and his craft is being torn asunder, but Black Star keeps himself upright. He's survived worse. The possibility of that far-off future is a small wave in a crowd of typhoons.

He closes his eyes and nods, opening them with a grin uncharacteristic of a man who's received upsetting news. "You're that eager to get away from your neighbors, huh?"

Soul grimaces. "Hiro might be a factor, yeah."

"Oh, is that the guy that woke us up at six by… reciting poetry, I think?" Maka scratches her chin. "He was really loud, and _really_ bad at it."

"Dude lives with his washed-up celebrity uncle. They moved in in the apartment next to mine four months ago, and they've been a pain in my fucking ass ever since."

"Sounds rough," Black Star says without an ounce of sympathy.

"You have no idea."

No one wants to bring their attention back to the only thing on their minds, so they let it slide, the conversation progressing from irritating neighbors to past dorm-mates to Soul's collegiate adventures without any of them looking back. It's incredible how quickly one can brush things of large significance under the rug when there are a few friends to help shove them out of sight.

They leave Ocho Burger behind after the conversation becomes lighthearted and raucous enough to earn them an irate glare from the man behind the counter. Walking is best without a destination in mind, and not a single one of them knows where they should go. Through fate or circumstance, their wanderings lead them to a bridge running over the highway, where the wind blows through sides of protective fencing like ghosts through an old home and, above the sea of headlights, they can almost see the stars.

"It's kinda loud here though, isn't it?" Soul asks, holding his bangs out of the way as he's buffeted by the breeze. "There's a reason we never hang out here anymore, and this is it."

"Okay, maybe it is, but you've gotta admit the view is worth it." Black Star points skyward, up at the tapestry of lights decorating the night sky.

Soul whistles. "Shit, you've got a point. How'd you know it was going to be such a good night for this?"

"I told him," Maka interjects. "There's no way Black Star would ever keep up with stargazing trends. There's a power outage somewhere in the city, and the sky is clear, so there's less light pollution and a perfect view of the stars. Cool, huh, Soul?"

Soul nods, casting his gaze upwards at the distant points of light that litter the dark sky like cosmic dust. "It's cool, yeah."

The beauty of a rare glimpse at the universe is not lost on them, but none of their small group is that inclined towards long periods of time spent staring and developing pains in the neck. Black Star vents his need for motion by climbing the bridge's chain-link fence, watching from a slightly elevated position as his friends grow restless.

Maka is the first to propose a change of venue, as per the usual. "We should head back," she says, leaning off of the fencing and stretching her legs. "I'd really rather be somewhere with air conditioning right now."

"With the wind going like this, you don't really need it," Black Star points out.

"Okay, and I want to go call Crona again. There's nothing wrong with that!" Maka huffs. "They're probably going to go to bed soon, and they've got a really important doctor's appointment tomorrow."

The embarrassment she displays at being caught in the act of caring manages to be endearing, though not so much as to be above affectionate mockery.

Soul gives her a languid smile. "You've got it real bad for that kid."

He receives a sharp punch to the shoulder for stating the obvious. Black Star snorts.

"I'm dating you too, you know!" Maka tells him. "If you're going to be a jerk about me being a good girlfriend, maybe I won't call you as much when we're the ones dealing with long-distance."

Watching Soul's face fall would qualify as prime-time entertainment if shown on the right channel.

"Hey, not funny," he protests. "I've got no problem with going home now if you want so you can call them. I wasn't keeping you away from your soulmate or anything like that." Soul pauses as Black Star does a front flip off his perch on the chain-link fence. "Nice one," he says, taking a moment to applaud before turning his attention away from the person present who obviously craves it most. "Actually, Maka, I'll stick around here for a little while longer. I'll catch up with you soon, okay?"

Maka takes a moment to find her voice, but when she does it is happy and smiling. "Sounds good. I'll see you both later!"

The silent understanding in their shared gaze for the two seconds prior to her cheerful response is something that Black Star both wishes he could understand and is glad he cannot. He waves an exuberant goodbye as she leaves them, only stopping when he feels the weight of Soul's hand on his shoulder.

If Black Star is the sun, Soul is a star that burnt out. He was someone else once, before Black Star knew him, but that was then and this is now and even when he was a different person, Soul was never one to burn so brightly.

"I want to talk to you for a sec," he says, as if that wasn't already clear. Casual conversation was nice while it lasted, but Black Star seems doomed to an endless parade of earth-shattering exchanges.

Perhaps he should look into astrology. See if the planets aligned in such a way as to fuck him over on the cosmic level at some point this past week.

Black Star folds his arms behind his head and prepares himself for the worst. "I'm listening. What's up?"

If there's any praise to be given for Soul's friendship, the least to be said is that he knows when to cut to the chase.

"I'm sorry that we dropped this stuff on you so suddenly. I'm just not used to keeping shit from you, even if you're not gonna like it." He sighs. The sound is a mere exhale of breath rather than a herald of calamity. Perceiving it as such is a step in the right direction.

"Truth is, I'm gonna move out to where her and Crona are as soon as I can," Soul continues. "There's not much tying me to where I am now; I mean, I only moved out here because my parents cut me off and I didn't have anywhere better to go. Maka's already got a career plan and a future in Maryland. I've got a handful of friends and a minimum wage job I could care less about."

"I thought we made over minimum wage?"

"By a few cents, sure." Soul fishes in his pocket and comes up with an empty hook. "Shit, really wish I had a cigarette right now."

Under the normal ten-minute circumstances of a sun-baked parking lot and an uneventful afternoon, Black Star would preach the risks of a nicotine habit upon mention of such a thing, and Soul would declare his right to do as he pleased. But the stuff under their feet is concrete, not asphalt, and the night air is not so all-consumingly warm.

Black Star rubs the back of his neck with one hand, and with the other, threads his fingers in the cold metal of a rusted fence. "It's real early for you guys to be talking about moving in together though, isn't it? You've barely been dating for three hours."

"Five, more like," Soul corrects. "And it's probably too early, yeah, but… you're the one who introduced me to her back when I first moved here, you already know how fast we bonded. Crona I wasn't sure about at first, but things change. Even if things don't work out with the three of us, I want to be there for both of them as much as I can. Not just a voice on a phone line."

Four years ago, when Black Star was a fry cook turning twenty and maybe four people in the goddamn country knew his father's name, Maka and her then-roommate Crona had come to town for a weekend visit. Soul still been in college then, a friend that Black Star had made at some point without remembering how or why their bond had come to pass, and was easily the best candidate to meet a couple of friends from out of town.

The afternoon where he watched Soul and Maka first shake hands is the closest Black Star has ever come to feeling like a fourth wheel.

He does not need to be told that Soul would put his perceived duty to Maka above everything else in his life.

"You don't have to explain it to me," Black Star says, crossing his arms over his heavy chest. "I'm allowed to doubt you for a second, but you don't know me at all if you think I'm not gonna support you no matter what."

The relieved smile on Soul's face only lasts an instant before Black Star spins him around and shoves him back the way they came.

"Wh—"

"Don't wait around here talking to me, dumbass! You finally got yourself some people to date after all this time and you're just gonna waste time with me like always? Seize the moment, Soul! Tomorrow night we're all gonna be piss drunk, and Maka flies home after that, so you know what that means?"

"Do I want to?"

"It means this is your only chance to get laid, and I would be failing you as a bro if I didn't tell you to seize that horse by the fucking reins." He forcibly turns Soul back around and gives him another push, gentler this time. "Or, y'know, just go watch some lame indie movie or whatever you do with your time. Make her listen to those dumb records you like."

"Bitches' Brew is _not_ —"

"Get going already!"

Soul doesn't take much convincing. His resistance crumbles like a roughed-up granola bar in the hands of a child, and as easily as that, Black Star has won and Soul is walking away from him at last.

This is a victory, isn't it?

If it's a victory it's one that he doesn't deserve, not when that joy was half-faked and he's still not sure if he means what he said.

He didn't ever want to be good at lying.

And still, there's a certain comfort to be found in the soft smile on Soul's face as he says goodbye, in the knowledge that for some people, at least, things are turning out alright. He's jealous, maybe, of Maka's bright future and lofty goals and her being and doing everything that he never could, but if he looks past that bitterness he finds that he's happy for her, happy for them at his core.

Black Star waits for Soul to round a corner and disappear from his sight before following suit, leaving behind the concrete and chain-link refuge of the familiar bridge with only a momentary pause. With his foot about to take leave of the curb, he turns back, eyes cast upward, and looks into the depths of the stars.

If he was a fortuneteller, maybe he could read his own future in the sparkling abyss of the night sky. He hopes that if he was, the stars would have good things to say.

The bus he takes home smells of cheap vodka and cigarettes.

He gets off a stop early, not for the sake of exercise or extending his time outdoors, but out of a bizarre conviction that in such an unspeakably long day, he still hasn't done enough. Years of living here have etched the distance between the bus stop and home deep into his brain, giving him a goal to run and a time to beat. He's slower on the sidewalks, but he races up the stairwell six seconds faster than his usual. He calls it progress.

After two minutes spent banging on the door, as though that'll make it open faster, and one apologizing to Tsubaki for pitching a fit, Black Star collapses on the couch with eyes closed, shutting out the flickering lights of the TV screen and the stains on the ceiling with a commitment to ignorance. Object permanence is something he can learn to go without for the brief space he needs to unwind.

Even with the world shut out, he can sense the presence of his phone on the table, like the frontrunner of a race senses second place closing in. He thinks of the unanswered messages he knows he has, the goodnight messages from Maka and the response from Kilik he's either awaiting or dreading, and decides that they can wait. For better or worse, he'll see them tomorrow. He can postpone the inevitable for the eight hours it takes him to sleep, and then meet it head-on.

Black Star rolls onto his side, and falls asleep like a computer shuts down.

In the morning, there is a blanket over his body and static on the TV. Pulling himself off the couch with the finesse of an Olympic athlete on tranquilizers, Black Star stumbles towards the bathroom and the sanctuary of a warm shower contained within.

The bathroom door is closed, which does little to impede his process until he collides with it head-on. As he reels from the impact, the door opens, and from the motion he receives his second injury in as many minutes of consciousness.

It takes a bit for him to get the cursing out of his system and notice Tsubaki frozen on the threshold of the bathroom entrance, staring at him with a combination of surprise and concern.

Instead of asking after his well-being, as would be the norm for someone having just witness a loved one in pain, Tsubaki rubs the sleep from her eyes and tells him "The party's today."

Black Star rubs his aching face. "How about showing a little sympathy for my ordeal here, huh? I already know about the party, you don't have to remind me."

"Whenever I ask you if you're okay, you tell me not to doubt your strength."

"Okay, fair." Black Star brushes his bangs over the angry patch of red on his forehead, realizing in doing so how long it's been since he got a haircut. "Hey, do you know who's bringing what to the party? I've got some suggestions for whoever's in charge of drinks."

Tsubaki rubs her chin as she thinks. "I'm pretty sure that Kim is handling that? I'm bringing paper plates, and you're supposed to get the root beer. I'll take care of that for you if you want though — I'm stopping by a convenience store on my way to the party anyway, so it wouldn't be a problem for me."

"Have I ever told you how awesome you are?"

"Definitely not often enough, but thank you." She smiles and sweeps past him with the elegance of a Victorian matron. Black Star follows behind her like a lost puppy, knowing that if Tsubaki is headed to the kitchen, breakfast is soon to follow.

"So you're working all day today, right?" Black Star asks between bites of rice and egg.

"Yes, and please try not to wreck the apartment while I'm gone." She says it with a mocking tone, but there's precedent for that warning to be needed. "Other than that, all you've got to do today is be at the party on time."

When Tsubaki leaves, she hugs Black Star before saying goodbye, and the dew speckled in the color of her eyes tells him that she hasn't forgotten yesterday, that she's still worried about him and will probably never not be. He worries about her too, but his concern is in the subtleties of his actions, listening for the shifts in the tone of her voice and knowing what to say when he hears it breaking, being wary of those that have hurt her and warning her of those that still might. There is more than one way to be someone else's safe harbor.

The door closes, and the fan in the kitchen seems to whirr just a little bit louder.

An unfortunate fact of adulthood is that having free time is less exciting when you no longer have the distractions of playgrounds, trading cards, and those kids down the street that you play kickball with on Sunday afternoons. There's things to fill the space between now and later, but they're tedious things, the kinds of activities that occupy your hands or body without letting you lose track of time.

Black Star does the dishes, takes a shower, goes for a run, and kills far less time than he'd like.

The afternoon is a long wait, a stretch of six hours defined primarily by an all-consuming boredom and an obscenely large number of push-ups. By quarter to five Black Star has long since sweated off the benefits of his morning shower, and his channel-surfing efforts have yet to bear fruit or familiarity. He's not sure how much of a relief the latter is. Anger would at least keep him occupied for a short while.

Speak of the devil and the devil will come, but he does not say his father's name, and so the faces of the flickering screen remain those of strangers. A soap opera comes on with the next click of a button, showing a handsome man with slicked-back hair holding an unconvincingly deceased woman to his chest and lamenting how little he knew her before she died by his own hand.

"You shouldn't have stabbed her, dumbass," Black Star mutters. This scene is probably not meant to be relatable, even as metaphor. He changes the channel.

The sun has sunk low in the sky by the time he begins preparing himself for a night full of not wholly positive possibilities. Streetlights and passing cars illuminate the vista outside his window, trying to and succeeding in outshining the sunset. Black Star ignores the view and yanks on his best sneakers.

He hasn't touched his phone all day and he accepts the risks that come with that, like the distinct chance that Kilik at some point responded and told him to not bother showing up. If that's the case, tough luck for both of them, because he's already on his way out and there's no looking back. Locking the door behind him is a commitment that he's ready to make.

The bus ride to McMortie's seems longer than usual. His company for the short journey seems to be made of especially noisy strangers, all coughing and chatting and in one case maybe crying, a symphony of human sound to assault his eardrums and make the long drive feel longer. The man in the seat beside him smells of coffee beans and worn leather and cities far away, and Black Star wonders if this wanderer was just as lost when he was twenty-four.

Bus stops go by like a drawn-out countdown. Black Star is waiting through the final seconds of an exam he knows he'll fail.

The brakes kick in, and the bus pulls to a halt less dramatic and screeching than Black Star would have liked. He rises and pushes his way to the open doors, making his journey down the aisle of the bus like a one-man funeral march. He faces the unknown with a mundane form of courage.

He can smell the fryer oil and burger grease from three city blocks off. The sneakers he laced thirty minutes ago already feel worn, but he runs two of the three like he's going for gold. Drama, action, ever-mounting suspense; the people still want a fucking show, don't they? When has he ever failed to perform? He feels his heart soar as he hurdles over a badly parked moped and lets himself forget, for the brief time that his feet leave the ground, how unbelievably nervous he's discovering he can be.

McMortie's still has its sign lit up, even though the lights inside are dimmed and the parking lot is long since emptied. As he draws closer, his strides become plodding steps and in a few short motions he is frozen in place on the concrete curbside.

Kilik is standing outside the restaurant doors, his glasses illuminated by the light from his phone. He doesn't notice Black Star, not at first. When he does, he acknowledges present company with an awkward wave and the polite gesture of stowing his phone.

Black Star approaches Kilik first, picking up the cement blocks he calls his feet and moving forward. He returns the wave as a delayed reaction, six seconds after the fact, when he's already close enough to Kilik to see the new band-aids around his knuckles.

"Am I here early?" Kilik asks him.

Black Star blinks. "Huh?"

"I didn't actually know about this whole thing until you mentioned it in your text? I had to ask Liz for details. She seemed kind of upset that I knew."

The casual way he phrases the statement is underlain by a stiffness and uncertainty once foreign from Kilik's tongue. But it's the thought that counts, and Kilik is speaking to him like he still thinks of him as a friend.

"Shit, was this supposed to be a surprise?"

The door swings open.

"Nice to see you two getting along," Stein says, cigarette balanced between his lips. "Why don't you come inside and help us setup?"

The interior of McMortie's is not something that changes significantly with an early closing and a lack of patrons. Even with half the lights turned out, it's difficult for a place so immediately familiar and entrenched in the fumes of fast food to cultivate an atmosphere of anything but cheap dining. Stein, as much a part of the scenery as the ancient fryers and burnt-out menu display, does his part in making the place more welcoming by slipping away into his office the moment his employees cross the threshold.

If he listens closely, Black Star can almost make out the unmistakable sound of Stein's phone. There aren't many people who set their ringtones to a tinny recording of _"we're losing him, doctor."_

Pushing aside the few tables not bolted down doesn't do much in the way of clearing space, though Black Star can't fault the event's organizers for trying. Across the dining area, Liz and Kim are arranging a display of red solo cups and oversized soda bottles, a stack of pizza the size of a small child situated beside them.

The disappearing act isn't Stein's only contribution to the festivities, as is obvious from the lack of daily clutter underfoot. Their manager is quick with a broom, on top of knowing far more ways of spinning one around than are possibly necessary for a man not employed as a baton twirler. Neither Liz nor Kim would have been so fast to banish the buildup of crumbs, meat chunks, and various wrappers that accumulate on the floor every day without fail. Black Star reminds himself to later give Stein a grudging thank-you.

Despite being the only other two people in their immediate sight, it's neither Liz nor Kim who's first to welcome Black Star and the man of the hour. Their welcome wagon is a blond girl with the land speed of a cheetah and the impact force of an army-regulation missile.

"Holy fucking SHIT, Patty!" Black Star exclaims as his longtime friend tackles him in the bear hug of the century. "You're lucky I'm strong enough to take that kinda blow, but you've gotta be more careful. If you hit Kilik, he would have _died_."

Kilik, very much alive, rolls his eyes. "I'm not made of glass, y'know."

Patty releases Black Star from her grip, transfers her attention to her next victim, and smiles devilishly as she crushes Kilik in the vice of her arms.

It feels wrong to laugh at the way Kilik winces. They've survived the first ten minutes of each other's company, but their tenuous comradery is a two-player minigame, easily lost by an accidental shove or a nervous slip and unlikely to last long without a dual commitment.

Still, it's hard to remain lost in overwrought perceptions when the younger Thompson sibling's maniac energy is present. Patty is the life of the party before it's even begun.

"You're both wimps!" she declares, grinning like a slapstick cartoon. "Great to see ya!" She throws her arms around their shoulders and forcibly turns their three-man unit to face the food tables. "Hey, Sis! The big man and the guy of the hour are here!"

Liz tears her attention from the presentation of plastic cups and sugary drinks, tapping Kim on the back and letting her move forward as if to tag her in. "Who? — Oh, right." Her eyes narrow dangerously. "That guy that turned this from a surprise party into just a boring Sunday night get-together."

Black Star winces. "That was—"

"I'm kidding; you really think I'd be angry about that? A party's a party, who cares if we don't get to see Kilik make a goofy expression for two seconds?" She lifts her hands and shrugs her shoulders in the universal gesture of _'what's done is done.'_ "You might be early, but we're only waiting on another three or four people, so the gang's pretty much all here already."

"Is Jacqueline still coming?" Kilik asks. He seems to move further and further away from Black Star the longer they remain in proximity, like an extended pan-out or an optical illusion. He can't tell if the tension he's feeling is one-sided, or not, if it's just him feeling the earth crack and split open at the seam between their feet, but he assumes the worst from the static atmosphere and how Kilik doesn't cast a glance at him even in peripheral.

"Eh, she should be. I mean, Kim's here, so odds are we'll see her sooner or later." Liz glances at the two feet of space between the resident set of best friends. "Hey, Black Star, you want to help me grab some stuff from the back?"

She's throwing him a lifeline painted in neon orange. He reaches for it and grabs on tight.

"You got it!"

Liz gives a small exhale of relief. "Great. Kilik, you're an actual adult, I'm just gonna trust that you know what to do to set up a bunch of food without messing up. We'll be back in a few." With that, she whisks Black Star away to the depths of the restaurant.

The kitchen looks cleaner with the lights out; the ever-present stains of grease and oil are hidden by a lack of halogen. Liz stops him by the empty fryers, whirling to face him with a expression made indistinguishable in the half-darkness. Her bracelets jingle as she places her hands on his shoulders.

"Good luck," she says.

"What?"

"You really need me to repeat two words?"

"You dragged me back here to say two words?"

"And to get you and Kilik away from each other." It's hard to tell with the shadows on her face, but if Black Star squints, Liz looks almost concerned. "I didn't expect to ever call _you_ a buzzkill, but whatever you've got going right now with Kilik is some seriously bad mojo. This whole thing is supposed to be for him, okay? You out of everyone here should want him to have a good night. Either talk it out, or suck it up and save it for later."

Black Star blinks. "See, that's more what I was expecting with this whole secret back room meeting thing."

"Thanks." The sarcasm rolls off her voice in thick droplets.

"I hear you loud and clear though." In the murky dark of the fryer area, he doesn't have to worry about faking a smile. "I'm not gonna mess this up for him."

The white cloth of Liz's shirt stands out just enough for Black Star to see her shoulders relax.

"I'm holding you to that one, big man," she says, prodding him in the forehead with a manicured finger. In the southern hemisphere of the dining area, a door slams, and the music starts. Liz turns her ear to the sound with a barely visible grin. "Looks like we've got ourselves a party."

It takes a while for things to get going, with newcomers trickling in irregularly and infrequently. Tsubaki and Jacqueline arrive within half an hour of each other, both of them similarly unused to attending this kind of gathering and visibly unsure of what to expect. There's not enough people for it to be considered a crowd, even after Soul and Maka show up bearing gifts of chips and salsa, and Kim remarks that they're better off that way.

"Crowds are impersonal," she says, pouring a small amount of vodka from the expanded drinks table into her cup of soda. "That's a good thing if you're looking to steal someone's wallet, but it's no good for having a conversation."

"Who goes to a party to have a conversation?" Black Star asks, filling up his fourth glass of something tasting like caffeinated motor oil.

Kim snickers. "According to Kilik, you do." She peers over into his cup. "Is that the weird energy drink shit Patty brought? Let me know how that one goes for you."

Black Star finds it easier to avoid Kilik than he'd expected, given how hard it is for a fish to hide in a puddle. In a small company, confrontations are best eschewed by engaging in conversation. He listens in on Maka and Kim trading college stories, tells Patty about the origin of his new bruise, antagonizes Tsubaki and Liz over their small gestures of romantic devotion, and steers clear of Soul and Kilik and whatever the fuck it is that they're saying.

He's over by the slowly depleting stash of pizza helping Patty overfill a paper plate when the door swings open, heralding the arrival of their last and latest guest.

With the music going Black Star can't very well hear from across the space of six tables, but he can see the ugly bruise coloring Kid's aristocratic cheekbones and the way Kid's lip has swollen where his knuckles connected. His fingers go to his own injuries without bidding, and he wonders if his own skin is that colorful.

"Woah, Kiddo's the guy you fought?" It's a small miracle that he doesn't drop his two-ton pizza platter when Patty's voice breaks him from his bruise-inducted reverie.

"Yeah, kinda." Black Star hands the leaning tower of pepperoni slices over to Patty before his luck runs out. "It wasn't actually a fight. I punched him and then he punched me, and the boss broke it up before it got good. It's a real shame, y'know? Kid punches _hard_."

Patty gives him a look he interprets as doubting, though her gaze is more of a blank slate than a set definition. "So did he deserve it?"

On the other side of the room, Kid laughs at a joke that Black Star can't hear.

Black Star rubs at the dark ache on his jaw. "No."

"Huh." Without further comment, Patty drops another three slices onto her plate and saunters off in Kim and Maka's direction.

By nature, Black Star is a decisive person, often to a fault. Instinct is a better guide than overthinking; he's always operated on that principle, and maybe that dichotomy is his problem now. He's thinking too much about all of this shit, reading into things more than he needs to and stressing too much about what he thinks he finds.

Actions first, consequences later. Like hell he's going to spend his whole night walking on eggshells.

Jumping an empty table for the sake of taking a direct route is entirely pointless, but Black Star knows from experience that nothing gets attention like a front flip and the loud thud of sticking a landing. Those who know him have already looked away by the time he stands up, already well desensitized to his superfluous feats.

Kid, however, knows Black Star about as well as a barista knows their regulars, by face and name and a few exceptional actions, not by true persona or typical self. They haven't spent enough time together for him to acclimatize to the frequent stunts. Startled as he is, he stares with his eyes wide and jaw open, apparent conversation with Liz brought to a grinding halt by the sight of someone performing a move out of a parkour demonstration.

He snaps out of his awestruck daze when Black Star marches up to him and fixes him with a look that hasn't made up its mind about what it wants to mean.

"What do you want?" Kid hasn't had long enough to wholly take himself from astonished to frigid, but he manages an impressive hostility. "I've already had one bloody nose this weekend, so I'd prefer if we could keep this civil."

Black Star gives him a gentle tap on the shoulder. Kid's response is mild befuddlement instead of anger or a wince, and Black Star takes that as a good sign. There's more intact tinders in their burned bridge than he thought.

"You throw a mean punch, I'll give you that," he says, "but I'm not looking to fight you right now. I was going to ask if you wanted to come outside and talk to me for a sec. It's kind of hard to take a conversation seriously when you've got upbeat pop music playing, so…"

He almost thinks that Kid's going to tell him to fuck off. But against all odds and despite all recent injuries, his offer is met with a nod after only brief consideration.

"Of course." Kid turns his attention back to their silent third wheel. "Liz, I'm afraid you'll have to tell me about your old job some other time. Tell Tsubaki that we haven't left when she gets back from the bathroom, alright?"

Liz gives him a lazy salute. "Whatever you say, chief. Don't kill each other out there." Her business concluded, she strolls off to keep her sister company, walking to the beat of the music's bassline.

"Let's go out back," Black Star says, jabbing his thumb towards the kitchen's darkened depths. "I don't know about you, but I don't like having personal conversations in front of a window." Kid nods his agreement, and allows Black Star to lead the way into the belly of the beast.

The air that hits them when they push open the weighty back door is warm and humid, but it is the comfort of a soft blanket rather than the suffocation of desert heat. A solitary light post flickers dimly over the employee parking and drive-through lane arrows, a swarm of small insects throwing themselves into its glow. Above them the sky is clear and dotted by stars, and the highway far beyond the property fence is bright and alive. Just a month ago, it would have been the perfect night to catch fireflies and pretend to be young again.

"I've never been here at night before," Kid comments mildly, closing the door behind him with as little sound as he can manage. "I assume it's not usually this empty?"

 _We get more customers at night_ is the response the question demands, but eight minutes at a laid-back party is more than enough time to spend in avoidance of a necessary action, and Black Star has never been one to hesitate.

"I'm sorry," he says. "For punching you. It was a dick move. You seem like an okay guy, and you really didn't deserve it."

Kid blinks. The dim glow of the light above is reflected in the gold of his eyes. "I have to say I didn't take you for the kind of guy to apologize."

"Yeah, well, I'm usually not. Don't make this weird."

A discarded burger wrapper rolls across the parking lot like some bizarre urban tumbleweed, shedding flecks of dried ketchup as it goes. Kid makes a disgruntled noise at the sight and gives chase, cursing at the wax paper just loud enough for Black Star to hear.

"Sorry about that," he says as he returns with his prize. "I can't focus on anything else with garbage like this floating around; I had to take care of it."

Black Star glances at the piece of trash pinched between Kid's fingers. "Dude, I have no idea how you deal with working here if that's the kind of thing that gets to you."

"Badly." Kid speaks with a flat affect, looking out at the distant highway instead of at the man standing besides him. The wrapper in his hand crinkles as his grip tightens.

There are burn marks on the concrete curb from where Soul last put out his cigarette. They will be gone by the next time it rains.

"So why did you do it?" Kid asks.

Black Star looks up from the small pattern of dark circles. "Huh?"

Kid meets his eyes with an even stare. "I mean you punching me. After having half my face turned into a massive bruise, I think I deserve an explanation. So, why did you do it?"

 _Because I was jealous of you,_ Black Star thinks. _Because you take things for granted, because you thought I needed your pity, because you reminded me of something I was trying to forget,_ and a dozen other reasons that come nowhere close to justifying his actions.

He sighs. "This makes me sound like even more of a douche than I've already been but… pretty much just because you brought up my dad."

Kid's gaze softens, and he places a hand on Black Star's shoulder in a display of polite condolence that Black Star finds it hard to accept. "I can understand that," he says. There's sympathy in his eyes again, and Black Star finds it hard to decide if this is really better than the previous hostility. "You still shouldn't have punched me, but at least you've got half an excuse. Having your father on death row can't be easy."

"Can we fucking not talk about my dad?" Black Star snaps. Kid pulls his hand back like he's been burned.

"Fuck, I _just_ said that I punched you because you brought him up, and so you go and do it again? How does that not seem like a bad idea to you?"

Black Star's shoulders tremble with anguish. To him it tastes more like rage.

They lack the weaponry of an old-fashioned standoff, but the tension is enough to qualify. A breeze sweeps through the empty parking lot, and the wrapper that Kid's still holding flutters like a flag of surrender.

Kid breaks eye contact first, his gaze darting down to the grimy pavement.

"...You're right, I wasn't thinking," he says, his tone almost robotic in comparison to Black Star's tirade. When he looks back up, his eyes are not cold, and yet there's something in them that feels like the blunt side of a sword. "But the fact that you're going through some shit doesn't give you carte blanche to be an asshole. You're better than that."

In lieu of a vein twitching, Black Star's lips curl in an angry snarl. "How would you know that? Maybe I'm an asshole all the time and my shitty dad's got nothing to do with it."

Inside, the music changes, indicated by the muffled sound of a thumping bassline making itself heard through a heavy door and brick wall. Even without vocals or rhythm, Black Star recognizes Kilik's taste in pop.

"I asked Liz what your deal is earlier," Kid says. "She speaks a lot more highly of you than I would have thought, although I didn't really go in with high expectations. So does everyone else, actually. And while I guess it's possible that every single person in this godforsaken restaurant is a bad judge of character, I don't think you'd have so many people in your corner if you were really all that bad."

The logical response for someone famous for an inflated ego should be a lack of surprise, a boastful declaration that of course they'd say that, his friends would be fools to not acknowledge how lucky they are to know someone so great. There is no greater opportunity for bragging than a confirmation of narcissism.

Black Star's reply is not a proud acceptance of Kid's unconventional compliment. It is a few seconds of silence, and a small, surprised "Oh."

"Oh?" Kid repeats.

"I mean, that makes sense, yeah," Black Star says, scrabbling for purchase in the footholds of the conversation. "So you're gonna forgive me for messing up your face because a bunch of fast food workers think I'm cool, right?"

Kid snorts. It occurs to Black Star that this is the closest he's come to hearing him laugh. "I didn't say that."

"Hey, worth a shot."

"Don't push it. All I meant was that I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here, and maybe a second chance."

'Maybe' implies uncertainty, but it's clear from the half-smile on Kid's lips and the lack of ice in his eyes that he's already made up his mind.

Black Star leans back against the hard brick of the restaurant wall, eyebrow raised. "That's pretty nice of you. What'd I do to earn that favor?"

There's a pause, where the bass goes quiet and the highway traffic slows down, as if the night itself is taking a moment to breathe. Then it passes, and the world begins to turn once again.

"You apologized to me," Kid says. "It was just the decent thing to do, but it shows me that you're trying. And if I'm going to work with you, I might as well try to be your friend."

Black Star's eyebrows go for a new height record. "You seriously want to be my friend after I tried to fight you in a parking lot?

Kid sighs. "I suppose I do. You're a strange guy, but I've heard a lot of good things about you, and despite evidence to the contrary, I want to believe them." The sympathy comes creeping back into his body language, a kindness that Black Star definitely doesn't want and isn't sure he deserves. Kid shoves the burger wrapper he's been holding into the pocket of his designer jeans and shrugs. "Besides, I guess I feel for you, in a way."

An offhand comment from days before pushes itself to the forefront of Black Star's mind, and seconds later, something clicks into place.

"You got daddy issues too, huh?" Black Star asks.

Kid nods resignedly. "Comes with the territory of being the son of someone powerful. I know it's not comparable to your situation, but we've both got less than perfect family lives."

"I bet I could kick your dad's ass. Doesn't matter powerful he is."

As far as exasperated glares go, Kid's ranks pretty highly. "Firstly, that's not what I meant. Secondly, you are five years old. Thirdly, do not fight my father."

"Relax, I was kidding." Kid rolls his eyes, and Black Star almost smiles. "So are we good?"

A moth dances around the lightpost, its wings casting dappled and transient shadows across their faces. Kid nods, and for an instant, with patches of dark playing on his pale face, he looks older than his years.

"Yeah. We are."


	6. Company Culture

Returning to the party is made much easier by having one less person to avoid. Upon re-entry, they find the crowd just as spread out as when they left, though the groupings have changed, and more bottles from the drinks table have been emptied.

Parting is not such sweet sorrow when it's done on good terms. They exchange a silent look, a gesture more 'catch you later' rather than farewell', and with that note of finality, their paths diverge. After a small nod and a fleeting glance, Kid heads over towards Soul and Maka with the casual determination of a movie extra crossing in the background, leaving Black Star alone with questions he's only now remembered to ask and the discomforting white noise of an off-key piano track.

He lets Kid go and turns his attention to better places. There will be another time for him to get those answers. He and Kid will see each other again, as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow and he will have his second chance. The future is both far away and all too soon, and in the present there is free food and friends to bother. Between the two there is no contest.

The pizza has long since been eaten, and the restaurant's perpetual stench of fries and old grease is beginning to creep back into the sensory landscape of their part-time dwelling. By tomorrow it will be as though tonight never happened, for the guests and their banquet will be gone, and tile floors do not stain.

Kim and Jacqueline are notably absent from the congregation before him, Black Star observes, though the sounds of retching coming from the women's restrooms would indicate that Kim at least hasn't left yet. However, speculating on the source of audible nausea isn't how he intends to spend what remains of his evening. He says a short prayer in the church of his subconscious for Kim's lost lunch, and heads back into the dining area to find a friend.

Liz almost spills her drink when Black Star taps her shoulder from behind. "Shit, give a girl some warning or something!" she exclaims, clutching her chest as though she's had a heart attack. Once recovered, she looks him over with a discerning eye, and approves of what she doesn't find. "Neither of you have any new bruises, so I'm guessing things went well?"

"Duh. How're things out here?"

"Eh, good enough. Patty's going to head home with Kim and Jackie once Kim's done tossing her cookies, and I had to watch the new couple mush their faces together for a few minutes earlier. It's not exactly a fucking rave, but thank god for that." Her voice sounds like an unfocused photograph. She's drunk, he realizes, but it'd be more of a surprise if she wasn't, as the alcohol is free and the entertainment is sparse.

"There's been some creepy fuckin' gym rat hanging around the benches out front," Liz continues, remarkably cavalier for someone describing a probable stalker. "Also, Stein's not in his office anymore, so we think he might've slipped off to call the police."

"He could've just called from his office though," Black Star points out.

Liz takes a moment to think this statement over. "Oh. Yeah, in that case he totally ditched us."

Across the room, Maka laughs, and the music crescendos.

"Huh. Didn't think Tsubaki was that good at telling jokes," Black Star comments, pushing aside the potentially murderous stranger and their absentee employer.

"Well of course _you_ didn't," Liz sighs with the dramatic tone of two cups of vodka. "Around you, she's always laughing at your jokes instead of telling her own. I mean, she's not exactly a comedy genius either, but you get my point."

Black Star doesn't completely register the last sentence. His focus has never been as stellar as the rest of him, and it's difficult to keep your mind in the moment when you're realizing just what you take for granted.

"Yeah," he says. "Sounds about right."

"Hey, is something bugging you?" Liz asks. Somehow, she's more perceptive over the blood alcohol limit than under. "If it's something Kid said, don't worry about it; the guy means well, but he's got the people skills of… fuck, I'm too drunk for metaphors! He's just not good with that kind of thing. You know what I'm saying?" Her glazed eyes drift away from Black Star and over to the window behind him. "Huh. Looks like the creep outside's got a friend now."

"Maybe it's his boyfriend or something," Black Star suggests.

Liz snorts. "As if; no one's gonna date a guy who looks like he's _trying_ to make his hair look like shit, no matter how big his biceps are. Plus, I think the other guy might be Justin, and Justin _definitely_ knows better than to go for weirdos like Mr. Hairgel out there."

"Hey, he could have a great personality!"

"He's creeping around outside a fast food restaurant at some super late hour on a Sunday night, and I don't think guys with great personalities usually do stuff like that."

"You never know!" Black Star insists. He knows when to take a loss, but acting on that knowledge requires a humility that he's never once possessed. He turns around to take another look at the man he'd only glanced at before, as though a second viewing will help him win a lost and pointless argument, and recognizes both strangers outside just a few seconds too late to pass on their names.

Bare knuckles connecting with someone's face produces a very unique sound, a fact that Black Star knows real goddamn well. However, this is the first time he's heard someone's nose break from the force of a swift punch.

Black Star doesn't notice that the music has stopped until the only noise is the resounding echo of an awful crack, and the cashier from Ocho Burger triumphantly shouting "THERE'S YOUR FUCKIN' PAYBACK, SHITHEAD!" From his position just by the window, Black Star has front row seats to the beginnings of a beatdown. The dull thuds and assorted curses from the duo outside prevent the situation within from being a stunned silence, all conversation halted and all heads turned to the sudden brawl.

No one suggests that they all play spectators to the pending crime, but there are some quirks universal to even the most deliberately unique of humans, and the morbid fascination with watching a trainwreck unfold would seem to be written into their very DNA. They crowd around the windows within seconds, Patty pushing her way to the front and Liz preemptively holding her back, all else abandoned for the sake of seeing a fight.

"Do you think we should call the police?" Tsubaki asks nervously, wincing as one of the two men takes a knee to the stomach.

Liz tightens her grip on her sister's shoulder just enough to be noticed. "I kinda doubt that the boss'd be okay with cops crawling over his property," she says. "Let's just wait it out and drive whoever loses to a hospital."

At the end of the audience line, Maka opens her mouth as if preparing to be the voice of reason, and closes it again, having decided against making them see sense, or so Black Star assumes. A preference for watching the show would come as no surprise from a girl once famous for fistfights.

There's a bizarre sense of community in watching a McMortie's district manager beat up a musclebound man with a broken nose and too many piercings. Black Star doesn't even mind Soul's elbow jabbing into his side as they jockey for a better view, not when they're getting this kind of entertainment. He finds himself cheering when Justin lands a solid blow on the unnamed aggressor, and he doesn't realize how much he's gotten into the fight until a hand on his shoulder pulls his mind back to a world not built on bloodsport.

"Hey," Kilik says. In the space between his first word and his next, Black Star can see him wince at the sound of ugly blows. "You recognize that guy out there, right?"

Black Star nods. "Yeah, that's the dude from Ocho Burger — the one who rings up our food and gives me the stink eye while he's doing it."

"The word you're looking for is 'cashier.' But yeah, that's him. Guess him and Justin have some kinda beef if this is the second time they've gone at it like this."

"Any idea what their deal is?" Black Star can take his own guesses, of course, but the odds are that the men in the parking lot are duking it out over a childhood grudge. "You've got the scoop on 'em, right?"

Kilik shakes his head. "Nah. I mean, I've heard rumors, but who hasn't, you know? Most of it's total crap." He pauses, though the noise and gossip of his nearest neighbors neatly fills the gaps that his silence leaves. "Hey, while everyone's watching a couple of weirdos beat each other bloody… can we talk? You said that we could if I wanted to here. And I do want to."

Black Star answers him with a long stare and a short nod.

"I… Yeah." Is that a frog or his heart that's gotten lodged in his throat? "We can head to the back if you wanna do this somewhere people can't hear us as well."

"Stein's office is probably open," Kilik observes. He does not wait for his suggestion to be approved before he starts heading to the back, leaving Black Star no recourse but to abandon his front row seat and follow behind.

Outside, the fighters break apart, and the restaurant holds its breath.

The jars of organs lining Stein's shelves are illuminated by poorly-made strip lighting, reminiscent of some morbid and run-down museum after visiting hours have ended. There is more than enough light for Black Star to see Kilik's face, but he looks different with viscera at his back. Something raw and painful is hiding behind his dirty glasses frames, and Black Star wonders if it's really the environment that's making him look so foreign.

"Okay," Kilik says, after a few moments of extended silence and wondering if the dead eyes around them can see. "Do you want me to break down the situation so we both know the deal?"

"You don't really have to," Black Star tells him, but Kilik is already pressing on.

"I told you that I got a new job, and instead of being supportive about that whole thing, you got mad and avoided me for days. Like, I get that stuff changing isn't easy but…" Kilik rubs the side of his head, knocking his glasses momentarily askew. The sigh he lets out comes as the preclude to a balloon's deflation. "I kinda want to just forgive you for all this and pretend nothing happened, but this isn't the first time you've done something like this. Just the worst."

Black Star gives him a blank stare where most people would narrow their eyes. "I don't get what you're talking about with that last part, but I said I was sorry already. I acted like a dick, I get that, but this is literally the first time I've ever pulled something like this. When have I ever stopped talking to you for days before? Usually when I'm mad at you we arm wrestle it out or something like that."

The look Kilik gives him is too despairing to be called exasperated, but as there exists no word to describe the emotional state of 'I can't fucking believe this,' there is nothing else that Black Star can call it.

"Dude, we've known each other since high school. There's probably no one that knows you better than me. So believe me when I say that the way you deal with things hasn't changed at all since then."

If Black Star listens closely, which he rarely does, he can hear the rhythmic thump of an agitated heart. Logic tells him that it's his own body's tempo filling his ears, but then again, the heart on the shelf to his right just might have moved.

"Is that such a bad thing?" he asks, and he knows the minute the words leave his lips like vultures taking flight that he will regret the question.

Kilik never snaps. Black Star knows this about him, like he knows that Kilik used to play baseball and once read all of Sherlock Holmes in a night. What Kilik has is a quieter form of frustration, the kind that seeps out through a hard-worn wall of patience when someone who wants to be the bigger man reaches the end of their rope.

"God, you're really asking this?" The hint of tired laughter in Kilik's voice feels like the dull edge of a kitchen knife. " You just… you never talk anything through, Black Star. You just expect your feelings to work themselves out, and you take it out on the rest of us when they don't. Mostly, you take it out on me."

The realization that Kilik is right does not feel so much like the stab of a sword as it does the dull sting of pulling out a stuck thorn. It hurts, yes, but only for a moment, and then it fades into background noise like all other accepted facts.

"I'm sorry," Black Star says. And he is, not just for Kilik but for himself, because he knows that what comes next will not be easy.

The future is a vague concept, collecting minutes and months and years of moments into a single cluster of unanswered questions, but, for the first time since he was sixteen and disenchanted with public education, Black Star knows what it holds. It's only a small light on a dark path and and the way beyond it is still unclear, yet that's enough for him to take a chance and move forward at last.

"Thanks for the apology," Kilik mumbles. His expression softens by an increment small enough to defy metric definition. "It's good enough for me, I guess, but I gotta ask… is this going to change anything? Every time I've been seriously mad at you, it's been because you pulled something like this. And I don't want to be mad at you anymore. You're a really good guy, mostly. It's just that you sometimes don't seem like you've grown up at all since we were in high school, and I wanna believe that that's not true."

"My dad's about to be killed," Black Star says.

It takes a few moments for Kilik to take in such a blunt statement of a harsh truth. When the words have sunk in and buried themselves in the floorboards, the only reaction that he can give is the unusual sympathy of a quiet "I know," and it will have to be enough.

Black Star scratches old burn marks on his forearm left by mishandled oil. "What you said about me not talking things through made me realize that I've never said that out loud." Suddenly, the organs on the office walls are easier to look at than his best friend's face. "He's getting the death penalty, I mean. It's not like he's getting taken out back and murdered, but, you know, it's kinda the same outcome."

"Do you know when?" Kilik asks.

Black Star shakes his head. "Nah. They told me when I got the call about it, probably, but I forgot what exactly they said." The noise he makes is too bitter to be laughter. "Real shitty of me to just forget something like that, huh?"

Kilik's silence is that of someone with no response.

"I don't know," Black Star says, running a hand through his hair, noticing as he does that the gel he put in this morning has started to lose its strength. It's lucky that he can't bring himself to give a shit about his current appearance. "Dad's dying, you're leaving, and I'm probably gonna flip burgers until I croak. I want to be happy for you, and I know I should be, but it's just not happening. Give me like a month or two to work this out, and I'll throw you a party or something when I can congratulate you for real."

"We're at a party for me right now."

"Yeah, well, I'll throw you a better one!"

Under better circumstances, without two fights and five days of avoidance between them, Kilik would have smiled at Black Star's bold declaration of an unrealistic promise. The fact that he doesn't is not painful. It's where they're at right now, and Black Star has accepted this. Within the short span of a week, he's learned to be content with a certain degree of estrangement.

Through the paper-thin walls of an aging office, the unified cries of a gathered crowd are weak and underwhelming. Black Star wonders what caused such excitement, whose face has been bloodied and how great was the blow.

"I'm proud of you for getting that out, dude," Kilik says, his sympathy genuine but slightly stilted, "and I don't want to act like my personal junk is more important than something like that, but…we still should talk about me leaving. While we're here, and all."

The object that settles in the pit of Black Star's stomach is much colder than any stone.

"Yeah," he says, wishing he had the same amount of unbridled confidence in himself as he did back when actions spoke louder than words. "We should do that."

"You were a fucking asshole about it when I broke the news," Kilik starts off, as blunt as as a worn-down blade. "You're still being kind of an an asshole about it, actually." He sighs, and rubs the bridge of his nose where his glasses have yet to slide down. "I know you don't want me to leave, okay? But there's no way I'm going to stick around here if I could be doing something better with myself. All I want here is for you to at least be okay with seeing me go. You don't even need to be happy for me."

"I want to be happy for you!" Black Star exclaims, his voice coming out louder than he'd meant. "I really, really do want to be happy for you, okay? You're probably going to be a lot better off wherever it is you're going than here. You deserve a better job than this too. I get that! I just can't be happy for you as long as all this means we're gonna start growing apart."

"We don't have to do that," Kilik starts to say, but Black Star is spitting out a retort before the sentence has finished leaving his lips.

"Maka said that too! You've known us both since high school, you know that we used to be closer than anything. Then she left for college, and like, she's still the closest thing I've got to a sister, but it's not the same, you know?" He doesn't realize that he's balled his fists until his hands start to sting. "I don't want that to happen with us."

The dimly lit jars of hearts and kidneys that writhe in the corners of his vision are somehow less upsetting than the possibility of losing a friend. It could always be because he's grown used to them, over the last six years of trips to Stein's office and wincing at his employer's most prized possessions, of course. He has never had the chance to acclimatize to loss.

"We'll still be friends," Kilik says, and there's no way he doesn't know how hollow those words sound. "Things are gonna change with us, yeah, and it might be rough. There's not much we can do for this one but see how it goes."

Black Star is sure that his knuckles would be white if he bothered to look down. "I don't like change." This is by definition untrue — Black Star thrives on change, when it comes to him in the form of good news and brighter futures, and when the subtle shifts in the routine of his life are not so hard to take. He makes a conscious effort to unclench his fists. "I mean, I don't like change when it's stuff like this."

The muffled sound of a roaring siren cuts an awkward pause into their conversation. It's impossible to tell what manner of emergency vehicle it is, but for the the men outside, either an arrest or an ambulance would be appropriate.

"I'm gonna miss seeing you so often," Kilik admits when the screeching wail fades out, leaving behind a dull ringing in their beleaguered ears. "But I'm not going to stick around at this dead-end job just for your sake, and, honestly, it really upsets me how you act like I should. I've got Fire and Thunder to look out for, and I want my grandma to have a shot at retiring soon. Priorities, you know?" He's trying to be the more mature of them; it's obvious from the way his tone is still an even sheet as Black Star's only a few clouds away from a storm. It takes very little to be a better person when up against a man with an unpleasant cocktail of inferiority complexes and delusions of greatness. Kilik clears that bar twice over.

There's something that's still going unsaid, even with them both dusting the cobwebs off things they'd buried, but it's just barely out of Black Star's reach, and he's already fucking exhausted from talking in circles without stretching himself even further.

"Nah, it's fine," he says, as the water rises to his chest. "I'm not gonna stop you from chasing your dreams, or whatever the next best thing is. But you gotta promise not to forget about me or this place when you're important and successful, you got that?"

By the time Kilik registers the request and gives a nod in response, Black Star is ready to drown.

He doesn't quite register what Kilik says next. The words are swept away by the roar of repressed guilt loud in his ears, by the subconscious bewilderment at the slasher flick setting of this painful conversation, and by the unexpected feeling of Kilik's arms around him, holding him tight.

He could count the number of times they've done this on his fingers if he tried. Fist-bumps and high-fives have always been their preferred form of physical affection, taking precedence over things more tender than half-second contact. They don't hug much, and Black Star has never considered that a bad thing until this very instant, as he comes to understand in the space of a split second that a person's arms are as much a life raft as they are a place to call home.

"Things are going to keep changing," Kilik says, quiet as a summer night and unsaid goodbyes, "but you and I, we're still gonna be friends. This was a bad time for all this shit to happen. I don't think either of us was ever going to stay here forever. It's just bad luck and bad timing that I'm leaving first."

Black Star can feel the stubble of Kilik's overgrown beard rubbing against his skin with the motion of words like distant ships, and the waves lapping at the corners of his mind begin to recede. He's soaked to the bone as he wraps his arms around his dearest friend, and Kilik is not a rock but a patch of sun in a tropical storm. He isn't safety, and he isn't survival, but in him Black Star can see that the storm will end, and they will have the time to try again.

"Yeah," he says, squeezing Kilik more gently than he would Maka or Soul, because he's already done enough damage. "Yeah, I know."

Kilik nods, and neither of them let go. Outside, beyond the rows of dead hearts and blind eyes and partitions of paper-thin walls, someone whoops triumphantly, someone curses loudly, someone probably needs an ambulance, and Black Star ignores every last bit of it.

"I don't want him to die," he mumbles into the warmth of Kilik's right shoulder. He knows that Kilik hears him from the way Kilik's arms go slack around him. Shock is an expected reaction. He tightens his grip on his best friend, and Kilik returns the favor.

Having a friend who knows when to be silent and let you fill in the gaps is a blessing rarely acknowledged. It takes a few moments of that silence for Black Star to drag his repressed thoughts into his conscious and work through their meanings, and Kilik is willing to wait.

"I don't want him to live either," Black Star continues, still speaking with less volume and less certainty than either of them expect from his words. "I just want him to stop existing. I want to be more than just his son. Fuck, I'm _gonna_ be more than that. Maybe it's a good thing that he's getting the ax, so everyone'll have forgotten him by the time my star starts to rise." He pauses, and Kilik begins to let go. Black Star doesn't stop him. "Do you think it matters if I don't bother seeing him? He never did anything to earn a visit from me, but…" The next part gets harder to say with each repetition. "He's still my dad. And I'm still his son, even if I wish I wasn't."

They separate as he finishes the sentence. Not all endings are bittersweet.

"I don't know what to tell you," Kilik says. "I'm never going to understand what you're going through right now. Wouldn't feel right for me to tell you what to do. Whatever you do, you're going to regret something either way. That's how it is with stuff like this. So I guess choose whatever'll weigh on you least when it's over."

There's a kind of wisdom to those words. Black Star decides that he'll take them to heart.

"Thanks. I'll do that." He makes a fist, and sticks it out in front of his friend. "So we're cool now, right?

There's more hesitation in Kilik's fist-bump than Black Star would like, but the tiny smile on Kilik's face when their knuckles connect makes up for what's missing.

Kilik gives him a small nod. "We're swinging back around to there, yeah."

"Hey, I'll take what I can get here. That's more than good enough."

The tiny smile widens imperceptibly. "Yeah, I thought it would be."

Though they're backed by walls of grotesque distractions, they look at each other's faces as they take those small steps towards the healing of their new scars. There's not much honor in choosing a friend over a writhing mass of decayed tissue, admittedly, yet it's significant enough to deserve notice from Black Star's hopeful subconscious.

Another roar penetrates the plaster walls of the former storeroom. It could be a cheer, Black Star supposes, though given context the emotion hardly matters.

"You think anyone's called 911 yet?" Kilik asks, noticeably more concerned than Black Star has thought to be.

Black Star shrugs. "Dunno. Tsubaki might've, but if she hasn't, no one has." He pauses. "You wanna go see for ourselves? I know we're on a roll with the emotional junk over here, but there's no way I'm gonna miss a fight like that just because I'm opening up to my best friend."

There's more old scars and healed bruises on his fists than there are on Kilik's whole body, but neither of them are strangers to physical violence, as spectators or as participants. The desire to see bones break and blood gush lurks somewhere in both of them, buried just a few layers less deep than normal. They're united in their urge to inspect the damage of a good brawl, and Black Star knows it as he's asking.

Kilik grins. "You know I do."

For a moment, neither of them move, though they well know that the battle will go on without them, and by hesitating they run the risk of missing the birth of black eyes and broken noses. They each wait for the other to move, and Kilik doesn't take the bait until Black Star steps forward to hold open the door.

Black Star makes sure to close the door gently. The jars rattle if it's slammed, and he doesn't want his boss finding dead hearts and shattered glass on his office floor.

He hears the hard smack of fists on skin before he sees the fighters. The crowd surrounding them has migrated since he and Kilik decided that unpacking emotional baggage was more worth their time than watching a brawl, now forming a half-circle outside instead of merely mobbing the windows. Kilik grabs a glass of water as they pass the drinks table on their way out.

The doors open outward, and Soul fails to notice that the audience is expanding until a hundred pounds of glass and plastic slams into the back of his head. Black Star apologizes by patting him on the back and elbowing him to the side for a better view.

"Holy shit, are they still going?" he asks, slack-jawed.

Soul's glare is a nonverbal 'fuck you,' but he answers nonetheless. "Of course they are. It's been twenty minutes and they're still going at it. I think the taller one might've broken Justin's wrist? He's punching a lot weaker."

As he speaks, Justin drives a kneecap into the other man's abdomen. Black Star winces with sympathy for a stranger he dimly dislikes. "Did anyone call an ambulance?" A quick glance over the gathered viewers reveals that Tsubaki is present, so there's a chance of medical aid en route, but there's a notable absence from their current congregation. "Hey, where'd Maka go?" He squints suspiciously at Soul. "I thought you guys were gonna go home together."

"I didn't drive her off, if that's what you're thinking," Soul hastily assures him in an irritated tone. "She's over there talking to Stein and some dude." He points away from the grown men beating each other bloody, over to the distant side of the parking lot where an unfamiliar old Chevy Impala has appeared in a parking space. Maka stands beside it, her back to Black Star as she faces a red-headed man dressed in a worn-out suit.

"That's her dad," Black Star says, and he knows that he isn't wrong, because Maka's body language is only so hostile when it comes to the family she'd rather forget.

Yet as he watches, her stiff shoulders soften, and she wraps her arms around her father, as slow and careful as learning to forgive. They embrace for a moment punctuated by the hard thud of Justin hitting the ground. As they let go, Stein emerges from the passenger side of the parked Impala, a lit cigarette perched between his lips. The three appear to exchange words that neither Black Star nor Soul can hear, and after another short and hesitant hug, Maka turns away from them and begins walking back to the night's main event.

She wipes away what can only be tears as she approaches, and behind her, Stein's fingers interlace with her father's.

Soul and Black Star automatically move aside when she returns, making space for her between the two of them. She takes the spot gratefully and without comment.

"Do you know if the boss called an ambulance?" Black Star asks, having the presence of mind to not comment on her father's appearance. Maka shakes her head.

"No idea. I think we're all just waiting for one of them to faint before we actually do anything."

"Do they know that they've got an audience?" Kilik muses, cringing with the rest of them as Justin headbutts his opponent.

Soul shakes his head. "Nah. It's like… you know, that tunnel vision shit that Star talks about. Star, remember that time you didn't notice Stein watching you fight a dude out here? It's like that."

"That guy deserved it!" Black Star exclaims.

"I thought you said you weren't getting into fights anymore!" Tsubaki interjects, her tone less a concerned parent and more a frustrated supervisor.

"I'm not!"

Justin screams as the cashier from Ocho Burger grabs his arm and bends it until it snaps. The parking lot goes silent. A small stack of Liz's money changes hands.

"Had enough, shitheel?" taunts the man with the awful hairstyle. "If I were you, I'd throw in the fuckin' towel already! How's a brat like you gonna fight with a broken arm?"

Despite his injuries, Justin smirks, and slams his shin into the other man's crotch.

The reaction is almost comical. There's a split-second pause as the cashier's brain catches up with the sudden excruciating pain between his legs, and then the floodgates open.

Never before has Black Star heard so many curses crammed into a single breath. He wonders if it's a world record. Both Justin and the cashier have collapsed to the ground, Justin grinning victoriously while the other man takes death threats to new heights.

"I called 911," Stein informs them mildly over the stream of profanity. "The dispatcher says an ambulance should be here within ten minutes."

"Fuck off, cockhole" spits the man with the wounded crotch. "I'll take care of my own fuckin' ballsack."

Black Star has never thought of Stein as a particularly powerful man, but in comparing the way that Stein holds back his enraged husband and how easily he's put a stop to his employees' fights, he realizes that he's been selling his boss short for years.

The ambulance arrives faster than expected, and the night is chaos after that.

Stein and his husband vanish around the time the sirens approach, the Chevy Impala along with them. The pairs of girlfriends scatter to the winds, Kim and Jacqueline having said a brief goodbye after stumbling out of the bathroom stalls, and Liz taking Tsubaki back to her place with vehement denials of Black Star's winking. As for the rest of them, there are unopened bottles of alcohol and a curbside to sit on, and though it's a weekday tomorrow, the night is still young.

"This isn't how I was expecting to spend my evening," Soul comments, passing a can of cheap beer to Black Star while the paramedics work their magic.

Maka nods in agreement. "This'll be a fun story to tell on the flight home tomorrow."

"Dude, no one's gonna believe this one," Kilik says

"I know," she sighs. "I wouldn't either."

Black Star takes a long swig of an awful drink, and watches the blood on the asphalt begin to dry.


	7. Break-Even

The next morning, he takes Maka to the airport in a taxi that smells of past passengers' mistakes.

"You didn't have to come with me," she tells him, picking a ripped seam in the leather seats with a bitten nail.

Black Star jabs a thumb towards his chest.. "Hey, someone's gotta see you off! Soul's your boyfriend now, but giving you goodbye noogies is always gonna be my job."

Maka snorts. "You're so thoughtful."

"You know it!"

The driver's eye-roll is just barely visible in the rearview mirror.

By the next stoplight, Maka's given up on the taxi's worn seams, and the clouds blocking the sun have begun to pass. Black Star covers an ugly stain of unknown origin with the toe of his sneaker.

"How'd things go with Kilik?" Maka asks as the cab jolts forward, ignoring all indications of a private matter on the basis of their close relationship. Granted, she's right to do so. There are no secrets between almost-siblings.

"He called me an asshole a few times," Black Star says, "but I think we're okay. And if we're not now, we're going to be soon."

"Mhm." Maka doesn't try to offer advice or sympathy, and Black Star likes that about her. She knows when someone's else's problems will fix themselves with time.

The taxi's radio is old and broken, a few buttons missing from its console and a slight distortion in its sound. From its speakers a quiet melody plays, the last hit of the summer just barely audible over the rush of neighboring cars and shouts of irate drivers.

"I might've had a crush on him?" Black Star says as the final notes of the chorus fade out. "For a really long time, actually. I'm pretty mad that it took all this for me to notice."

Maka blinks in surprise. "Really? Wow, so… are you going to ask him out or anything?"

A home insurance ad comes on, and the driver changes the station.

Black Star watches a dark blue pickup zoom past and shrugs. "Nah. That ship's sailed. I'd rather be his best friend than his boyfriend, and he'd probably feel the same if I asked. We're way better off without the awkward relationship stuff."

"That's… really mature of you, actually."

"I'm still gonna blow him at some point," Black Star adds before she can be too impressed. "But that's not because I wanna date him, it's because I owe him a favor and he agreed to take payment in the form of oral."

The cabbie appears to stifle a laugh.

"Forget what I just said," Maka groans. "And never tell me about whose dick you're sucking again."

"You texted me five times the first time you and Crona kissed," Black Star points out.

"That's totally different!"

"Is it?"

" _Yes_."

They take exit 564-S off the highway and head south, away from the slow suffocation of an empty city and into a long stretch of desert between metropolis and airport. The distance is inconvenient, but no one has ever complained enough for the situation to change, so the long drive remains. Perhaps, someday, the city will grow, and the vast expanse of unclaimed sand will be filled with dark roadways and glistening suburbs, but for now it stays untouched, a place for passing through and holding your breath.

In the back of the cab, Maka's suitcases play bumper cars at the slightest dent or ridge in the aging road. Black Star hopes she hasn't packed anything fragile.

"Why didn't you tell me your dad married my boss?" he asks suddenly, coming from somewhere far beyond left field. It's a rude and personal question at best, but he's been waiting to ask for hours and he knows she'll give an answer.

Maka twists one of her pigtails around her index finger and tugs hard. "Because I didn't know that he did. I kind of… didn't talk to him for a long time after Mama divorced him. You remember that, right?"

He remembers it like a family photograph remembers a small collection of forced smiles.

They were ten years old then, and she was angrier than his confusion. He had never had a father that he wanted to call his own, but she had hers, and she was always willing to share when it came to her earliest friend. It took two weeks for him to put the pieces together when her father stopped driving her to school, and two years for his best friend's anger to cool into a harbored grudge.

"Yeah," Black Star says, "You never said much about it, though."

"Mama got custody, so I didn't have to see him much," Maka explains. "After a few years of court-ordered visits and some really awkward holiday dinners, I decided I didn't want to see him ever."

"Oh," Black Star says lamely.

Maka continues twisting the blond ribbon of her pigtail uncomfortably. "He was kind of a mess. Between his cheating and I think a drinking problem, I just didn't want to be around him anymore. So we didn't talk for a few years." She curses under her breath as her ponytail holder snaps. "Stein's the one who helped me get back in contact with Papa, actually. When I visited you three years ago, he gave me Papa's phone number. I think I told you about that? "

"You told me you started talking to your dad again," Black Star agrees, "But you didn't mention that my boss helped you out with it! That's kind of important information, you know." It's not, but it matters enough in his mind to be granted the title. "How'd you get up the guts to call him anyway?"

In the distance, an airplane takes off.

"I don't actually know," Maka sighs. "Maybe I just got sick of being angry for so long. Until I did that, I hadn't talked to Papa since I was a teenager. I figured that's long enough for him to change."

Black Star nods. He's not used to envying an ability to forgive. "Gotcha. So did Stein just tell you that he married your dad right off the bat or what? Because I've been working for the guy for six years, and he never tells me anything."

"Oh, fuck no," Maka says. "Neither of them said anything about that."

"Wait, how'd you know then?"

"They were wearing matching rings, and your boss has a photo of Papa as his lock screen. It wasn't hard to guess."

"Right."

The airport draws near on the horizon, and Black Star prepares himself to say his goodbyes. It's hard to focus on an approaching farewell with comparisons of unwanted families filling up the pages of his working memory, but fuck if he's not trying.

He and Maka aren't alike at all, he realizes.

Between the future that she has and the career that he lacks, there is a divide between them, two continents of life experience separated by undersea canyons. She doesn't know what it's like to work a dead-end job for six years, and he hopes she never does, in the same way that he hopes for a brighter future and a greater purpose. Maybe if he had been less impulsive he could have turned out like her, but it's too late for any regrets. Her burned bridges have all been repaired, and he's content to let his old structures crumble.

She could forgive her father, and he can never do the same.

The taxi pulls up to the airport about as gracefully as a drunk elephant. The driver curses at his botched parking job and offers them a discount on the fare.

Maka's loose hair whips about her head as they step out, an uncommon wind blowing through the concrete columns of the airport gates and stirring the stagnant air. She heads to the back and pops open the trunk, only for Black Star to swoop in and gather up her belongings in his muscular arms.

"Want me to walk you to the gate?" he asks, holding her heavy suitcases like a stack of especially large novels. "There's no way you're strong enough to carry this stuff by yourself."

"That's why they've got wheels, dumbass."

"Sounds fake."

Rather than waste time pointing out the incredibly obvious, Maka turns away from him and makes for the sliding doors. Baggage in hand, Black Star follows suit.

"Before you leave," he says as they're waiting to check her bags, "I just wanna ask something. You're good with giving advice and stuff, so… quitting my job and asking out the guy I punched in the face: that'd be a bad idea, right?"

Maka blinks. "Those are both pretty bad ideas. The second thing might turn out okay, but it'd be hard to pay for a date without any money. I wouldn't do it."

"Okay," Black Star says, but Maka cuts him off before he can make excuses for his overwhelming inclination towards impulse decisions.

"Let me finish. I said that _I_ wouldn't do it, but you definitely would. You might even make it work." She shrugs, and meets his surprise with a grin. "You're kind of a fuckup, but I believe in you."

Black Star regrets carrying the luggage. It's almost impossible to strike an overconfident pose with fifty pounds of clothes and plastic casing occupying your arms.

"Of course I'll make it!" he says, more self-assured than is probably justified. "I don't need you to tell me that."

"Why did you ask me for advice then?"

"Hey, I don't need you questioning my choices."

Over the course of their friendship, Maka has become extremely adept at expressing exasperation with only a look. The one she fixes Black Star with as she reclaims her luggage straddles the border between 'oh my god fuck off' and 'if you say so' with the skill of a veteran acrobat.

"You can't come with me through security," she says as she's handing over her bags, deftly ignoring his hypocrisy. "That's not far from here, so you'd better hurry up if you've got any last words."

"That makes it sounds like you're gonna kill me and dump my body in a lake," Black Star observes with none of the apprehension typically associated with murder.

Maka cocks her head to the side as though lost in thought. "Hm. You know, I still might. Until I make up my mind, get over here." She leads him to a bench made from hard metal sitting a short distance from the cascade of escalators, dropping her carry-on on top of the commemorative dedication plate.

There is an endless stream of people moving up and down just a few feet away as they exchange inside jokes and forget to worry about time. A mother herds her children up to the second story as a man with a dark briefcase passes them on the way down, and Black Star knows that within five minutes he will have forgotten their faces.

"Are you going to be okay?" Maka asks, facing him straight on, without half-glances or room for doubt. "I don't mean with Kilik, or your dad— I mean are you going to be okay if quitting doesn't work out?"

"Definitely," he says, and he hopes to believe that. "I'll figure something out. There's no way I'm going to let my old man go farther than me." He is a footnote in his father's biography, a postscript in someone else's story, and he's been that way for fucking long enough. This is _his_ life, not an epilogue to his father's. "Dad went and got famous while I was wasting my time making greasy french fries. I've gotta start catching up."

"You think you'll make it?"

"Nah. I know I will."

Maka hugs him. She is a safe harbor after a long journey, and the few inches of difference between them is made more prominent by her holding him so close.

"I'm gonna miss you, jerk," she says, ruffling his overspiked hair with one hand in a weak imitation of a noogie. "This time, you have to actually text me after I leave. Promise?"

"It's not _my_ fault that you're bad at texting," he retorts, but he hugs her back all the same.

"Promise?" she insists, and his dedication to lighthearted ribbing falls apart.

"Fine, fine," he agrees, letting go to give her a thumbs-up. "We'll talk after you get off the plane; you've got my word on that!"

An alarm goes off on Maka's phone. "Shit," she mutters, grabbing her bag after a quick glance at its screen. "I'm gonna blame you if I don't make my flight, got it?" To emphasize the threat, she jabs a thin finger towards him, though it's much less intimidating when she hugs him again immediately after.

They don't actually say goodbye, and that's how Black Star prefers it. Maka wishes him good luck before she takes off for her flight, and Black Star waves farewell without saying the words. They'll see each other again for sure, though they both might change between now and then, and the lack of a verbalized parting makes it easier to spend so much time apart.

Missing Maka is a different feeling than missing Soul or Kilik. It's the bizarre absence of something that was once a constant, and will never be one again. Black Star has gotten over the discomfort of it all by now, but that doesn't stop him from feeling a quiet sense of longing as he watches a plane that might be Maka's soar across the afternoon sky.

He gets out of the taxi ten miles from home. There are things he needs to do and people he has to face, but he's still got time to prove himself to an nonexistent crowd.

Tsubaki is waiting on the couch when Black Star gets home. The TV is turned on, but the static is gone, leaving the crackling voices of game show hosts and the gentle whir of an old fan's last days of the year. He sits down and changes the channel to the afternoon news. She does not ask why.

Facing the music of a murderer's media junket is, for him, a form of mundane bravery. If nothing else, it's a start.


	8. Full Service

It takes two weeks for Black Star to pay his father a visit. In that time, Kilik leaves, Kid turns him down, Soul decides to quit smoking, and Kid changes his mind. It goes by in the haze of a movie montage, all sound and color with no defining moments. Time moves like molasses when he has something to wait for, or at least it's supposed to, but this is life in fast-forward, the speed of the hours robbing him of time to steady his thoughts. He counts down the days like a bomb's timer ticks down, and when the day finally arrives, he knows he is not ready.

The federal prison is two states away, and the bus ride there is a six-hour exercise in self-distraction. Black Star's phone battery dies four hours in, leaving him with a window seat and a thunderstorm of thoughts to keep him occupied until he arrives on some distant shore.

He wonders if his father passed by here when they drove him away, through the hillsides dotted with trees, across the wide rivers, and up north to the place where he'll die. It was winter when his father was moved here, Black Star remembers. He pictures the surrounding lands blanketed by snow, and wonders if his father found it beautiful.

The prison complex is a monolith of brown walls and grey fences amid the pine trees and green hills of the foreign landscape. Mid-afternoon has come and gone by the time Black Star reaches its borders, the shadows cast by the massive fortress stretching long and dark before him. The setting sun paints the sky in warm pastels, clashing harshly with the dull place below. Somewhere within these sandstone walls, his father sits and waits to die. The thought isn't as comforting as he'd hoped.

Inside, the halls are concrete and fluorescence, and his steps are gunshots in the empty corridors. There are guards posted at checkpoints and patrolling the halls, but they keep their heads down, and they all carry practiced apathy beside their thick batons. They do not care for Black Star or for the defeated families lurking just beyond the doors of lonely waiting rooms, wanting so desperately to leave, but too worried to go. In a place like this, it's easy to forget that there is a world outside where the sun still sets in pink and ochre, but he won't be here long enough to be drained of his colors.

This is only a goodbye.

"This way," says a guard with a face of old leather. "No weapons, no drugs, nothing that's gonna make my job any harder. Wrap it up and get going by six." He points Black Star to a set of double doors, and washes his hands of a problem that isn't his.

"Thanks," Black Star says, but the guard is long gone, and he is left alone with a door to open and a demon to face. Suddenly, he becomes aware of a thousand tiny imperfections, like the dark stubble covering his chin, and the burn marks on his hands from years spent in front of a fryer. The way that he notices bothers him more than the details themselves. After all this time and all this shit, he shouldn't care so much what his father thinks of him.

Luckily, self-consciousness has never suited him, and it's easy to stop worrying when you can draw on a vast reservoir of pent-up rage. Somewhere behind this door his father is waiting for him. Black Star decides to greet him with bitterness and steel.

He pushes open the double doors. The room inside is long and empty, filled with stalls and seats and phones to connect two sides of a plexiglass sheet, a barrier between outside and in that stretches end to end. Every one of the cheap plastic chairs on Black Star's side of the glass is empty, and if he listens closely, he can hear his own heartbeat, muted and gentle without the commotion of other voices to block it out. As he's listening, the doors swing shut behind him.

On the far end of the room, someone begins drumming their fingers.

Black Star hears his heart stop.

He doesn't remember the last time he saw his father, but he remembers the mugshots and blurry photographs of memory, and he remembers the many times he's asked himself how one man with a sharpened knife and a fucked up grudge could become a monster so easily. Monster, that's what they called his father the first time that story broke, with all its headlines of massacre and killing, and all these years later the title still fits. Monsters are meant to be hated.

The drumming continues. Black Star realizes that he's been holding his breath.

 _Relax_ , he tells himself as if he could. _There's nothing he can do but end up dead._

One foot in front of the other, legs like dead weight, Black Star begins walking towards the end of the room and the awful sound of his father's impatience. Every seat he passes looks the same in peripheral vision, chairs pushed in and phones hung up on their receivers, so neat and tidy for a place so sad. When his heavy body carries him down to the last stall, Black Star does not need to look up from the concrete floor to know who sits five feet beside him.

There are fifteen phones in this room that they could have used to talk. By choosing the furthest one, his father reminds him that a flair for dramatics is an inherited trait.

Black Star pulls out a chair, takes a seat, and looks his father in the eyes for the first time in years.

He's not what Black Star remembers, but then again, Black Star never expected him to be. A man is not a stagnant being by nature, and his father has had more than enough time to change. His face is more gaunt and scarred than it used to be, and the nose that he gave his son is bent and broken. Tattoos wind their way from his shoulder, over his collar and up his neck, an incomplete series of miniature stars. Black Star's hand automatically goes to his unmarked shoulder at the sight.

For a moment, they stare at each other across the plexiglass like wrestlers sizing up their foe. When seated, his father is enough inches taller than Black Star to make him feel small.

It's his father who makes the first move. The sound of fingers drumming on the grey counter ceases, and the last man he'd ever want to speak with reaches for the phone.

Black Star crosses his arms, and fixes his father with a defiant stare. His father's eyes narrow, but he takes no action. Only after Black Star has sufficiently tested both their patience does he pick up the phone. With a battered piece of wire and black plastic pressed to his ear, he can hear the gentle sound of his father's breath. He wonders what it feels like to know that the air in your lungs will soon run out.

"Orange doesn't suit you, White Star," he says.

The man on the other side laughs, low and hoarse. "Is that how you greet your own father, boy?"

"I'm twenty-four," Black Star retorts, like a child scorned.

White Star smiles. Black Star feels his insides twist.

"All grown up, I see. Still on the short side, but you can thank your mother for that." White Star speaks like he's gone years without conversation. His voice is unpolished granite, rough from disuse and sharp at the edges.

Beneath the counter, Black Star's free hand forms a fist. "I don't care about her. Don't go blaming someone else for your kid not turning out right."

"You're putting words in my mouth."

"I'd rather put my fist there instead. Too bad there's glass in the way."

This time, his father's smile is an empty threat. "With the way you're taking after me, you'd think I raised you myself."

Black Star's knuckles go white. There is static in his ears and a knife in his back nearly two decades old and he cannot, will not let White Star speak as if he knows him.

"I'm nothing like you," he spits into the receiver, clenching the cheap plastic so hard it hurts. "Fine, maybe I did get your shitty temper and ugly mug, what's it matter? I don't want to be like you. Don't act like that's a fucking compliment."

White Star meets his outburst with an even stare. "Alright," he says, scratching an old scar over his jaw. "You're a brat and I'm glad I barely knew you. Is that what you want to hear from me?"

"That's _way_ better," Black Star agrees sarcastically.

The crackling of white noise on the receiver sounds like a cyberpunk tide if they're both quiet for long enough to hear. There's a finger missing from his father's right hand, Black Star observes, and a chunk of flesh gone from his left ear. These imperfections will vanish with the rest of him when they burn his body, but the time hasn't quite come yet for that.

Black Star wonders what tales of old wounds his father could tell if he was given the chance. Someone famous for violence should have stories that seem lifted from cop shows and black comedies, but they've missed the chance for that bit of family bonding by several years and eight convictions.

White Star hasn't looked away from him for the whole of their shared silence. "Why did you come here, kid," he asks in Japanese.

"I've got a name," Black Star tells him in the same tongue. "You should know, you're the one that gave it to me."

"Whatever. You're not here for some last-minute reconciliation, so why'd you show? One last chance to tell your dad to go fuck himself, is that it?" There's a strange note of bitterness in his tone that Black Star doesn't expect, one that cuts like cracked glass.

Black Star doesn't break eye contact, no matter how much he wants to. He didn't come all this way to show weakness. "I'm here because I decided to be," he says, "and that's all you've gotta know. Thought I oughta do the nice thing and let you see your only son before you bite it."

White Star smirks so briefly that Black Star almost misses it. "Aren't you generous." He leans back in his prison-provided cheap plastic chair, resting a scarred arm on its back. "So what've you been up to?"

The question raises every alarm on the switchboard of Black Star's brain. This is not a man who cares for others; this is a man who took lives with his bare hands and a rusty sword and had the gall to think himself justified. Black Star remembers the trials, the ones he'd watched when he was younger and still thought his father worth missing. He remembers a guilty plea, and an affirmative answer when someone asked _'would you do it again?'_

In the theater of his memories, his father is played by a monster wearing human skin. Somehow no one notices the shark-toothed smile.

"Telling people to shut up about you, mostly," Black Star says, hoping to sound hostile. "Everyone's afraid of you out there, you know."

White Star laughs. "Everyone except you, is that right?"

Black Star cocks his head to the side, and keeps his face as stony as hollowed quarries. "Yeah, actually."

"You really do take after me," White Star says, like he's trying to make Black Star sick.

"Did you know they talk about you on national television?" Black Star asks, ignoring what he doesn't want to hear. " They put your picture up on the screen and everything, it's like you're a fucking celebrity."

His father doesn't smile this time, but Black Star can tell he's pleased by his fame, and he hates that he knows this man's body language so well. It's the same small motion of the shoulders that he's always done. He makes another mental note on his list of habits to break.

"They tried to get an interview with me when I was in the courthouse," White Star says. "Sure felt like a celebrity for the few minutes I had some lady with a bad suit shoving a camera in my face. Are they really still talking about my conviction?"

"Don't act like you're surprised," Black Star spits. "Wasn't that whole killing spree just you wanting attention?"

White Star's eyes flash. "Don't think you know what you're talking about, kid," he hisses. "It's none of your damn business why I did what I did. Show your father some fucking respect."

If it weren't for the barrier between them, Black Star might have reason to be afraid. But he's too angry and too tired of biting his tongue for that to matter, and this is his last chance to lash out.

He pulls down his lower eyelid and sticks out his tongue, like a first grader rubbing salt in the wound. "Earn it first, asshole."

"You never answered my question, you know," White Star points out, ignoring the pointed insult and speaking with a voice like steel. "Are you still working at that fast food place? Or did you find some other job that hires dropouts?"

If he had the strength to smash through plexiglass, Black Star would surely have his hands around his father's throat.

"Like you're any better than me," he snarls. "At least I've got time to change."

White Star laughs, and Black Star can hear his acceptance of death in between the notes of amusement. "You've got me there. If you ever get sick of working that dead-end job you've got, why don't you try for athletics? You always were talented with that shit as a kid."

His father talks like he actually wants better for him, and Black Star wishes he'd fucking stop. It's too late for any active parenting.

He remembers being eight years old and pressing his hands to the plexiglass as he tells his father about the trophies he'd won, asking White Star to come watch him sometime. The social worker seemed to pity him for that request, and it took Black Star another four years to understand why.

"It's not your problem what I do with myself," he retorts.

"Sure it is," White Star says. "I'm your father."

Black Star feels his patience snap.

"You're gonna pull that card on me now? You were behind bars all my life, what kind of a father does that make you? Saying hi over a stupid prison phone every time Sid drove me up to see you isn't the same thing as raising me, you know!"

"You weren't this angry last time," White Star says, and if he's hurt Black Star refuses to notice.

"Last time was four years ago," he says. "Shit changes."

"You could have come to see me."

"Ever think that I didn't want to?"

For a long moment, no response comes. Black Star considers pointing out that time is limited, but he knows he'd rather stare down his demons than talk them out.

The last time they spoke he'd talked until his throat went sore, and all it accomplished was convincing him not to waste his breath. He had finally asked his father for answers, defending his inquires more than was necessary for a justified interrogation. _'Why did you do it'_ is a question that should be easy to answer, and it was, but not in the right way.

White Star had told him that his victims deserved it. Black Star had disagreed.

They had fought then, with two dozen people on the other lines, Black Star all pent-up rage and White Star a study in misguided blame. On the way home from the prison, Black Star decided to stop caring.

"What did I do to make you hate me this much?" White Star asks. "You used to be so excited to see me when you were younger." His tone is bitter, and his eyes are cold.

Black Star narrows his eyes, and tightens his grip on the plastic phone. "You can't expect me to process your fucked up priorities when I'm five."

"The hell is that supposed to mean?"

"You abandoned me!" Black Star shouts. "You wanted to be a murderer more than you wanted to be a decent fucking father!"

White Star looks more confused than upset. "I abandoned you? I was arrested, kid, are you trying to blame me for this country's legal system?"

"You went off on some fucking murder spree when you had a kid to look after, did you just think you'd never get caught or something? I didn't think you were that stupid, old man." Black Star keeps the daggers in his eyes, hopes that his father will notice that he too can be vicious. "I fucking _worshipped_ you when I was a kid, you know that? I thought you were the greatest thing in the world, even when you went to jail, I wanted to _be_ you! It took me years to figure out that I could do better."

White Star makes no argument. He wears his half-contained anger on his sleeve, but there's something softer now in his steely gaze. God only knows what it might be. To Black Star, it seems unlikely that the man still has a heart to warm.

"I never went to college," Black Star continues, "never graduated, never got my GED, and you know what? I'm still going to be more than your filthy, murderous ass. "

"I'm the one who's about to die, and you think this is all about you?"

"Yes! Fuck, did you really think I came here for your sake? I'm not here to be your fucking pity party — you deserve to die! I showed up for one reason and one reason only, and that's to make sure you know that anything I achieve has nothing to do with you."

"You've achieved nothing, kid." It's the insult of a sore loser with no cards left to play, now that Black Star has shown his hand.

"Yeah? Well, keep watching me, old man, because someday I'll shine so bright you can see me from hell."

White Star smiles.

Years ago in a public school science class, Black Star's teacher had gathered him and a dozen other third-graders around a rented television, and had them watch a movie on the social behavior of wild primates. Most of the film went in one ear and out the other, as cheaply made documentaries designed for inattentive children are wont to do, but Black Star remembers the blunt-toothed grins of the chimpanzees, and a voice-over explaining why monkeys might bare their fangs.

In the world of predators and intelligent apes, showing your teeth is a soundless threat.

"You better," White Star says, and Black Star is no longer sure why he's smiling. "You'd be no kid of mine if you pissed away your whole life flipping burgers."

"Stop that."

"Huh?"

"Stop that," Black Star repeats, his fists shaking. "Don't insult me and then turn around and act supportive. You've done this every time I ever visited you, and I'm done with it! Either you're here for me or you're not. Stick to the insults. You should know where you stand."

He knows that White Star isn't aware how two-faced he seems. He knows just as well that saying this will change nothing, no matter how his father reacts. Even if by some unforeseen miracle his words enlighten a man who refuses to see his wrong, this is still their last conversation.

White Star rubs his temples. His steely eyes seem tired. "You want to hate me that badly?" he asks, and Black Star wishes this wasn't a guilt-trip.

"No! Fucking god, I don't want to hate you, but what's my other option? How am I gonna love someone who put being a homicidal nutjob over being a parent and keeps trying to bring me down? My _boss_ is more of a dad to me than you ever were."

"What's your boss like?" White Star asks.

"What?"

Slowly, like a smoker letting out a long drag, White Star exhales. Black Star hears it as a low static crackle.

"Kid, we've got an hour left before anyone's gonna come in here and drag you out. Think about it — do you really want to spend all that time yelling yourself hoarse? I don't care if you want to hate me. Go ahead and waste your energy on that if you want, just save it for after I've kicked the bucket."

Black Star opens his mouth, and White Star silences him with an extended hand.

"I'm entitled to a last request, and all I'm asking for here is some pleasant conversation. Tell me about your life, what I've been missing and all that. It's what people usually do for shit like this."

"I don't need your permission to hate you, old man," Black Star says.

"Save it, kid," White Star tells him. "Are we done fighting or not?"

When time is limited, spending a minute silently weighing options is by definition a waste. However, it's a waste that White Star allows.

After those precious seconds have come and gone, Black Star brings his gaze back to his father's face, and finds it in himself to be the better man.

"Fine, he says," resting one elbow on the counter before him as a substitute for crossing his arms. "You can have your small talk."

"About time," White Star starts, but Black Star cuts him off with a raised finger and a hostile glare before he can keep going.

"One condition," Black Star says. "You're going to be the one doing the talking. My life's my own. You don't need to know about it."

Incredulously, White Star raises a scarred eyebrow. "You want to hear about prison? Sure, I'll tell you what I've been doing for the past eighteen years: a whole lot of situps to pass time and Sudoku when I get the chance. Got in some fights before people learned to leave me alone, spent some time in solitary, but mostly? It's been two decades of the same thing every day."

"That's not what I mean," Black Star says. "You've told me all that before."

"So you want to know what I did before this?"

Black Star shakes his head. "Nah. You talked about yourself every time I ever visited. Tell me about our family again, those stories about them from when I was a kid. It's been a whole lot of years since I heard them, and I don't want to forget."

White Star stares blankly at him for a short moment. "My memory's not the greatest, you know," he says when he finds his voice. "But sure, I'll see what I've got."

It's hard to tell why White Star agrees to his request. Black Star is no expert in deathbed psychology, and he has never wanted to look at his father's mind. Maybe it's some kind of last-minute regret, he thinks. A final favor before becoming past tense. If that's the case, he'll take what he can get, while the man he calls a parent still draws breath.

He never considers that this might be an act of kindness. Men with so much blood on their hands are not prone to good deeds, and his father has never cared to be kind.

White Star tells him about ancient ancestors and their razor-sharp blades with frequent pauses between phrases and mistakes in chronology, the same stories that they both once knew by heart. He skips around between tales and takes his sweet time to going back to the very first one, but Black Star listens to every word.

Many years ago, when he was a wide-eyed child and his father was the sun at the center of his spiral stars, they had sat together outside a window with raindrops streaking down its panes and written out the names of all these half-legends in letters that they both barely knew. He had broken most of their dollar-store crayons before the end of the exercise. In retrospect, the pieces of paper-wrapped wax seem like an omen.

The knock of a guard with knuckles of withered wood echoes through the room as White Star finishes one of Black Star's favorite stories. "Ten minutes," she informs them, her voice worn granite.

"Fuck her," White Star says after the guard's heavy footsteps recede. "She won't check here again for at least another twenty."

"How would you know that?" Black Star asks.

"I got a lot of visits from lawyers while the trials were still going," White Star explains. "I've spent more time in this room than you'd think."

Somehow, Black Star has never pictured his father to have people to talk to. "Huh."

"Anyway," White Star says, brushing aside his long string of legal counsel, "got any last words for your old man?"

Black Star shakes his head. "I've said all I want to."

The truth is that he has enough to say to fill a short novel. He is not known for brevity, and in his father's case, he is not known for forgiveness. However, even he can't bring himself to be so cruel to a man with a countdown attached. If there's one thing he can do for White Star before the guy bites it, he can let them part on non-hostile terms.

White Star nods, and mercifully prys no further. "I don't have much more to say either. Been more occupied with facing my mortality lately than thinking of stuff to tell you before I go." He sighs, and drags a hand through his shaggy white hair. "Do me a favor and make sure they don't burn my body. I want a proper grave, alright?"

Hearing someone speak of their own death so casually is unsettling no matter the case, but there's something specifically chilling about a killer demanding his own coffin.

"Sure," Black Star says. "I can't pay for a funeral, but I guess I can shove you under a few pounds of dirt once you kick the bucket. Sound fair?"

"Sounds fair," White Star agrees, and says nothing further.

A moment passes. In this room full of empty chairs and worn concrete, sound travels quite easily. The exact physics of echos are unknown to Black Star, who spent most of his science classes folding paper airplanes and drawing five-point stars, but it seems unusual that he should be able to hear his father's heartbeat, counting down its numbered days.

That part might be psychological. He doesn't care.

"Hey, White Star?" he asks, tearing his eyes away from the dull grey counter to look at his father for what might be the last time. "You got any last words for your son?"

White Star shakes his head. "Just stuff you don't need to hear. Time's nearly up, assuming that guard's on schedule for once, so no point in giving some speech about how proud I am or whatever it is you want to hear."

"I don't care if you're proud of me," Black Star says. "I'd be glad if you weren't."

Beyond the distant door, Black Star can hear someone approaching. His father can too, evidently, going by how he straightens up and develops a sense of urgency.

"Don't think I ever told you," he says, "but you've got relatives still alive in Japan. If you went to Osaka and asked around about Star Clan, you'd probably find them. We made a real name for ourselves, back in the day."

"You're talking like even more of a old man than you already are," Black Stars replies. "I've already got enough family to go around. I don't need to spend half my income on an international flight to meet your folks."

The wooden knuckles rap on the door once again. "Time's up!" the guard's sandpaper voice informs them.

Black Star get to his feet before putting the phone back on the receiver. "Guess I'll see you in hell, White Star," he says.

The most maddening thing that Black Star's father has ever done is smile at him as he's about to go.

"Don't let me down, Black Star," he says, and then both phones are dead, and Black Star is walking back out to the hallway with something cold and hard stuck in his throat.

It takes forty-eight minutes and thirty-two seconds for the bus to arrive. He counts.

Numbness is a strange feeling. It seeps into you slowly, like a rising tide, and you don't realize it's there until there's nothing else left. On the long ride back to some form of safety, Black Star has a surfeit of time to reflect on his last hours in the company of his father.

There is no doubt in his mind that White Star deserves to die. Questionable parenting aside, a murderer with a clear conscience is something that shouldn't exist. Wishing death on your own father is wrong, he knows that much, but there can't be much of an issue with wanting someone to get what they're owed.

And yet, as he plays back the past two hours, he realizes that he no longer hates White Star, at least not like he did before. Those flames have gone out, leaving only lukewarm ashes, though he knows he could set them alight again if only he stoked the fire. His anger is still there, as is the hurt and betrayal built up over years of making excuses, but it's colder now, and it's easier to bear. Maybe it's the vague sense of closure that's half-buried his old grudge. Anything's possible in the realm of conflicting emotions.

He can't forgive White Star, no, he can never do that, but by spending those hours in his father's company, he's inadvertently found some kind of understanding. White Star is only human. A fucked up, violent, negligent human, but human all the same. And in a few weeks, he will die, and Black Star will be the one to put him in the ground.

Something twists in Black Star's gut. He thinks it might be pity.

Pushing White Star out of his mind, Black Star looks out the window, pressing his face close to its surface to see past the reflection of faded florescent lights.

Over the unfamiliar hills, the night sky is a tapestry of stars. There are constellations above that Black Star has never seen, bearing names that he's never head. Out here, in the empty space between cities, there's no light to block out the galaxy's splendor. The stars are perfect to gaze at through a dirty bus window, Black Star decides. Living where he does, it's anyone's guess when he'll see a sky like this again. His father can wait.


	9. Epilogue

The bus is late, for once. According to Kid's Rolex, it's exactly ten minutes behind schedule, a wait that would be much more vexing if a desert in winter was actually cold.

"I can't believe we moved here," Kid grumbles, removing a jacket that likely cost more than two months of Black Star's rent. "I've got all this winter wear that's never going to get used again. It's such a fucking waste."

Black Star raises an eyebrow. "Dude, I've lived here since I was four. What 'we' are you talking about?"

"My father and I, obviously," Kid says. "He'd always said he wanted me to live within driving distance for a while after I became independent." He grimaces. " _However_ , he didn't tell me that he planned on moving to fucking Death Valley."

"Come on, it's not _that_ bad! There's a really great pizza place right by your house, the weather's always nice, and, most importantly, you get to enjoy the pleasure of my company."

"I also had the pleasure of you punching me in the face," Kid points out.

"You've gotta stop using that against me," Black Star says, just as the bus pulls up to the curb in a cloud of exhaust fumes and city stink.

The driver is a tall man with bulging biceps and a facial tattoo, explaining why no one's yet criticized his sense of timing. Aside from him, the seats aboard are mostly empty. A girl with pale hair and odd makeup occupies the seat closest to Captain Swole, and a woman wearing rectangular glasses occupies a seat in the far back.

Kid and Black Star choose to sit a few rows back from the pale-haired girl and her black briefcase, though their selection is mostly random. Though the bus clearly is in need of some thorough cleaning, there are no odd stains on seats to avoid. All the little repulsive things that accumulate on vehicles like this have been miraculously contained to the grimy floor, where they can be simply stepped over. It smells of perspiration and worn-out sneakers, with the faint stench of gasoline fumes thrown in for the instant when they lurch forward.

"So," Kid asks, setting aside his complaints about the yearly weather, "Where are we going anyway? More importantly, why are you bringing me?"

" We're visiting my family," Black Star says, as if that explains everything. "You're coming because I like having you around."

"I thought Stein and the McMortie's crew were your family?" Kid asks, raising a quizzical eyebrow.

"This is the other side of my family! They're not as weird and Mifune doesn't keep organs in his office, so you'll probably like them. You like boring stuff, right?"

"What are you—"

"I'm kidding, Mifune's super cool. He's got a room that's just swords! Like, eighty of them. You're gonna love him."

"Oh," Kid says, unsure whether to be relieved or apprehensive. "That seems dangerous."

"Nah, it's fine," Black Star assures him. "He keeps them locked up so Angela can't steal them to play with. It's totally safe."

"Angela?"

Black Star retrieves his phone from his pocket, and flips through his saved photos until he finds what he's looking for.

"Here!" he says, handing his phone over to Kid for examination. "The guy with the long hair is Mifune, and the girl he's got with him is Angela. You can kinda see my hair off to the side, but you've gotta squint."

"Are they your cousins?" Kid asks.

"Nah," Black Star says, watching Kid zoom in on a sword in the background. "Angela's basically my little sister, and Mifune's just himself. I've known both of them for a really long time."

Kid nods. "I see." Satisfied with his inspection of the picture, he returns Black Star's phone to his owner. "How did you meet them?"

Black Star leans back in his seat, crossing his arms over his chest. "It's sort of a long story. When I was in middle school, Mifune taught a kid's kendo class a few blocks from my house. My foster parents must've wanted me out of their hair really bad, because they let me go after I only begged them twice. Went there for a year or so, learned some neat shit. The place closed before I ever got anywhere with it."

"So we're visiting your old kendo teacher."

"Not just that. Mifune's the one that took me in when I dropped out of school. I ditched my foster family and needed somewhere to go, and he didn't ask questions when I showed up. I lived with him and Angela for two years, I think." Black Star narrates his life like a bored sports announcer, lending no excitement or awe to game-changing plays.

"That's how I met Tsubaki too!" he continues, perking up noticeably when discussing his roommate. "She was Angela's babysitter. Mine also, according to Mifune. He didn't trust me to watch Angela myself."

The bus screeches to a halt, throwing all loose objects and passengers forward.

"Where the fuck did this imbecile learn to drive?" Kid mutters, combing his hair back into neatness after the upset of a sudden stop.

"Driver's ed?" Black Star offers.

Kid gives him the exasperated stare of someone who prefers his rhetorical questions unanswered.

Up front, another passenger boards. Kid doesn't realize who it is until Black Star leaps out of his seat and runs forward to bear-hug the newcomer with all the force he can muster.

"Black Star!" Tsubaki exclaims, surprisingly audible for someone with all the air squeezed from their lungs. "I thought you were going to wait for me at Mifune's!"

"We left really late," Black Star explains, releasing his grip and leading Tsubaki back to their seats. "But forget about that! Since you're here anyway, I can show you _this!_ "

Proudly, he rolls up the left sleeve of his favorite shirt, revealing the outline of a star tattooed on his shoulder. A diagonal line runs over the shape. "I just got it done," he says. "It's pretty neat, right, Tsubaki? You can touch it if you want."

"Wait," Kid interjects, craning his head over for a look at the ink in question, "you're telling your roommate about this before you tell me?"

"Tsubaki's one of my best friends," Black Star says. "And you saw me naked like two days ago, how didn't you notice this?"

Kid flushes a deep stop-sign scarlet, and makes no further comment.

The bus exits onto the highway, turning directly towards the sun. A few wispy clouds drift through the desert skies above, occasionally casting shadows over the earth below.

"How long is the drive?" Kid asks, pulling out his phone and earbuds.

"Forty minutes at most," Black Star tells him. "Mifune lives in one of the suburbs down south. Traffic's good, so it might be only thirty."

Kid nods, and puts his headphones in, closing his eyes as he prepares to block out his surroundings for the duration of the ride.

Black Star rests his head on Tsubaki's shoulder, knowing that she won't mind the scratchy feeling of his gelled spikes. "My family used to be mercenaries, way back when," he says. "That's what my dad told me when I was a kid. Said they all had tattoos like this." He touches his shoulder. "Just the star, I mean. The line's something I added myself."

Tsubaki doesn't say anything. She puts an arm around Black Star, and rubs his unmarked shoulder as a small comfort.

It's a long drive from here to the house he grew up in. That's plenty of time to talk things out, or to dream of gilded futures and childhood ambitions. Second opinions on potential careers are never bad to have, especially when it's something so risky as his lofty goals.

But his future is certain. Determination is all he needs, and someday, when the dust has settled, he can look back on this city and its dried-out grease stains and be proud of how far he's come.

For now, Tsubaki's shoulder is a good place to sleep. As his eyelids slide shut, Black Star watches a plane soar across the bright blue winter sky. Maka's visiting in spring, he remembers. No word on the date, but she's never flaked out before.

His father's name is on a distant tombstone. His family is alive, and that's all that he needs.


End file.
